Originally posted by: rbV5
Originally posted by: Heifetz
Originally posted by: Glendor
Sorry, but I have to ask my usual stupid question. Some day I'm going to learn enough about TVs to answer this myself, but till then...
Would this make a descent computer monitor? I have an AIW 9700Pro, and I want a TV or giant monitor for my living room entertainment center. I don't want two devices, but one that will do double duty. Right now I have a 19" Sony monitor, but from accross the room, it is hard to watch movies or watch TV on. I would like something larger.
Glendor out...
Don't think any TV will make a good monitor for normal use. It'll be fine for games and movies, if that is all you're planning to use it for, but I'll imagine that you'll have frequent eye strain if you're using anything that involves a lot of text. Just think of the difference between a 20" dell that run at 1600x1200 and this 30" tv that runs at max 1024i. Does the ATI have a max resolution for tv out?
It supports 1080i and the AIW 9700pro supports and also outputs 1080i using its native component output. At 1080i or 480p, the overscan is a little much with the Radeon for a desktop with my particular display, but using the new Center View Timing support in the latest Cat drivers, it will place a 1280x1024, or 1280x960 desktop nicely in a 5:4 or 4:3 box on the 16:9 display with black bars on the side. With powerstrip and the guides at AVS forums, you could also map custom timings onto it. So, it is possible to use it the way you want perhaps. The price looks to be a good deal to me.
But those are going to be interlaced modes and for regular computing tasks interlacing sucks big time and there will be very noticeable 30Hz flickering that will drive you mad. With a set like this the only way to avoid interlacing would be to use modes that will work with either 480p or perhaps 540p timing.
Anyway, for what Glendor wants I only see 2 reasonable options. One of those is a very large computer monitor like those made by monivision. I have one of these and it works reasonable well for this type of application. I have the model 6552sw. This is a 30" 16:9 aspect ratio monitor that supports resolutions up to 1280 x 768 @60Hz non-interlaced. It works pretty good especially considering it's price (under $1k), but many people, including myself, have had serious reliabiltiy issues with this monitor. I'm on my second one now, as the first one I recieved was defective. I've only owned it for a few months. I've heard of others having multiple failures within 6 months to a year with this same monitor. So, the relaibility of the monivision monitors, or at least this particular model may be questionable. I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope that this one holds up at least until I can get something better. The second option might be some of the new 30" or larger LCD TVs that can also accept a VGA input. I believe Sharp makes some 30" and 37" LCD TVs that may fit the bill. Whenever LCD technology gets better and cheaper, that's probably what I'll replace my monivision with, if it can hold up that long.
I'm not saying this Philips isn't a good TV set, but it's just that. It's a TV set and it's probably not going to be that great as a computer monitor. If you do intend to use it connected to a computer, you probably want to keep you existing monitor and use both in a dual monitor configuration such that you can use the regular PC moinitor for regular computing tasks and the Tv for video and perhaps gaming.