Saturday, September 09, 2006
Attaching a LCD TV to my Powerbook
I decided to take the plunge and sell our old 32" CRT TV and buy a same sized LCD TV before we move back to Vancouver, to save myself from getting a hernia during the move. I settled on the Vizio L32 HDTV since it got great reviews for it's size and price; not the best you can buy but I certainly don't need anything better and didn't want to pay over $800. What was most important was that it had good support for connecting a computer, because we're planning on ditching cable and putting the money into a Mac Mini (hopefully they will release a new Core 2 Duo "Meron" based Mini soon) and a really fast broadband connection.
Well I'm glad to report I'm very happy with the TV, the only complaints being the black isn't exactly "inky", there's no S-Video inputs and there's no menu option for 1:1 or dot-dot mode. The native resolution is 1366x768 so I thought I would use use a DVI to D-Sub (or VGA or RGB or whatever you want to call it) cable and my PowerBook G4 would recognize the resolution and that would be the end of it. I quickly discovered that it would not detect the native resolution but was stuck at 1024x768 which made text look like crap stretched out to the LCD's native resolution. After some web searching I downloaded and configured DisplayConfigX to give me a higher resolution available in my Displays Preferences. It wouldn't let me use the exactly resolution, forcing it to 1360 for some multiple of X reason. The picture looked better, but still not as good as I thought, and the VGA cable wasn't long enough and was very thick and heavy.
I looked up the issue on Apple's site and saw they had a DVI to HDMI cable (for about $120) and figured I could probably find one for much cheaper than Apple's. Naturally I did, buying a 10 foot DVI to HDMI cable on eBay for $10 shipped - how does Apple get away with these accessory prices? Anyway, on arrival I connected the cable to the HDMI port on the LCD TV and.... nothing. Blue screen, no signal. Stumped, I read the manual and did some more searching and discovered some LCDs only like the official 720p resolution of 1280x720 at 60Hz. Since the TV was showing blue screen I couldn't change the Displays Preferences, so I uninstalled the custom DisplayConfigX modes and rebooted.
Voila! Driving the TV at the stock 720p rate brought up a very crisp image. It's still a bit distorted due to the lack of a 1:1 mode on the TV, so the TV is stretching it a little to the native resolution. There's a bit of a problem with overscan on the top and bottom of the screen as well, so you have to be careful not to lose windows' title bar off the top, but it looks really good and plenty crisp enough to read text and use the LCD TV as a casual web browsing or email platform. Playing DVDs and downloaded anime on the PowerBook with the VLC Player looked great. Too bad the TiVo picture quality is lagging so far behind.
Next I connected my PlayStation 2 to the composite input and loaded up Gran Turismo 3. I instantly knew I was going to have to improve the situation; it was blurrly, bleeding and generally awful. I learned the best thing to do was to order a component cable, so back to eBay and bought one for $8 shipped. Connecting the PS2 to the Analog HDTV input using the new cable was like night & day - GT3 looks fantastic now, maybe I'll get around to finishing the Professional league. Too bad more games don't support 16:9 aspect ratio.
Well I'm glad to report I'm very happy with the TV, the only complaints being the black isn't exactly "inky", there's no S-Video inputs and there's no menu option for 1:1 or dot-dot mode. The native resolution is 1366x768 so I thought I would use use a DVI to D-Sub (or VGA or RGB or whatever you want to call it) cable and my PowerBook G4 would recognize the resolution and that would be the end of it. I quickly discovered that it would not detect the native resolution but was stuck at 1024x768 which made text look like crap stretched out to the LCD's native resolution. After some web searching I downloaded and configured DisplayConfigX to give me a higher resolution available in my Displays Preferences. It wouldn't let me use the exactly resolution, forcing it to 1360 for some multiple of X reason. The picture looked better, but still not as good as I thought, and the VGA cable wasn't long enough and was very thick and heavy.
I looked up the issue on Apple's site and saw they had a DVI to HDMI cable (for about $120) and figured I could probably find one for much cheaper than Apple's. Naturally I did, buying a 10 foot DVI to HDMI cable on eBay for $10 shipped - how does Apple get away with these accessory prices? Anyway, on arrival I connected the cable to the HDMI port on the LCD TV and.... nothing. Blue screen, no signal. Stumped, I read the manual and did some more searching and discovered some LCDs only like the official 720p resolution of 1280x720 at 60Hz. Since the TV was showing blue screen I couldn't change the Displays Preferences, so I uninstalled the custom DisplayConfigX modes and rebooted.
Voila! Driving the TV at the stock 720p rate brought up a very crisp image. It's still a bit distorted due to the lack of a 1:1 mode on the TV, so the TV is stretching it a little to the native resolution. There's a bit of a problem with overscan on the top and bottom of the screen as well, so you have to be careful not to lose windows' title bar off the top, but it looks really good and plenty crisp enough to read text and use the LCD TV as a casual web browsing or email platform. Playing DVDs and downloaded anime on the PowerBook with the VLC Player looked great. Too bad the TiVo picture quality is lagging so far behind.
Next I connected my PlayStation 2 to the composite input and loaded up Gran Turismo 3. I instantly knew I was going to have to improve the situation; it was blurrly, bleeding and generally awful. I learned the best thing to do was to order a component cable, so back to eBay and bought one for $8 shipped. Connecting the PS2 to the Analog HDTV input using the new cable was like night & day - GT3 looks fantastic now, maybe I'll get around to finishing the Professional league. Too bad more games don't support 16:9 aspect ratio.
# posted by Skye Poier Nott : 7:30 PM
