Westinghouse 37"/42" 1080P as computer monitor??? (1 Viewer)

[Joshua_M]

I am going to be staying at a buddies house while I am selling my house and looking for another. Not much room in the bedroom so I am thinking of buying a 37" or 42" flat panel LCD for HD cable, xbox 360, and as a computer monitor with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. It might be the only monitor for a homebuilt pc or an external monitor for a laptop, still undecided. Either way the computer will have a dvi out.

Is this possible and not only possible, will it look ok, good, great, or blow my socks off? Should I stick with 1080p or will 1080i/720p set work just as good.

 

[Allan Jayne]

The computer must put out the same vertical resolution that the monitor accepts. For example most computers put out 768p which will not go into a 720p input. A few put out 1024p. Some plasma and LCD TV's accept 768p and 1024p as well as 720p and 1080p.

If you run your computer at 1024x768 a 720p category monitor will suffice. If you run your computer at 1280x1024 a 1080p category monitor will give better results.

The horizontal resolution must also match for DVI and HDMI connections but need not match for VGA. For example 768p on a computer is usually 1024x768 while many 720p/768p monitors are 1366x768. Check the computer instructions and monitor instructions to see which can be made to match the other (avoid 1080i from the computer).

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

 

[Joshua_M]

It looks like the Mac Mini will output 1920x1200 through DVI. It seems alot of people are running a dvi-dvi connection from their Mac Mini to the Westinghouse 1080P monitors with great results...

http://www.123macmini.com/gallery/al.../050506142.jpg

 

[Hanson]

Most newer video cards will output 1280X720 and 1920X1080. If they don't you can use software like Powerstrip to create custom resolutions.

I've been using my HDTV as a monitor for four years now. My only issue is that I love the Lite-On Airboard wireless keyboard because a) it has a thumbstick, and b) it's IR, so I can teach a learning remote the keystrokes to handle transport controls for many software players. The suck part is that this unit is no longer maufactured, and the new RF units are a) expensive, b) require two handed mouse function, and c) can't be mapped to an IR remote.

If you have a PC hooked up to your HDTV, it also means you can watch any media format you have the codecs for. Beats the hell out of a DivX enabled DVD player. Plus, you can get an HD capture card and record OTA hi-def (and unscrambled cable as well).

Bottom line -- do it. You'll never go back.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The native resolution of the Westinghouse panels actually is 768. It scales the TV inputs. The VGA input will yield perfectly good results. I used a 27" Westinghouse as my TV and external monitor for my laptop for a while during the condo rennovation from Hell (neither the living room nor the home office/spare bedroom were available) and it worked fine. (It is currently in mothballs pending work on the master bedroom. Eventually it will go back in service in that bedroom while its 32" big brother, still in the box due to project delays, goes into the home office to serve as a monitor for my desktop system and a TV to watch shows and DVDs while I'm on the treadmill. )

Regards,

Joe