Questions about TV

[Waleska]

I have a regular non-hd 21' flat TV and I plan to connect it to my PC. Question is, what's the maximum resolution my tv will be able to handle without looking bad?.

Thanks in advance.

[foxyshadis]

LCD TVs are rated for a maximum resolution, you should plug the model into google and find out what yours is.

[Waleska]

Mine is a plain CRT TV.

[Doobie]

I have a regular non-hd 21' flat TV and I plan to connect it to my PC. Question is, what's the maximum resolution my tv will be able to handle without looking bad?

NTSC TVs only support VGA (640x480), and that's fuzzy. No "TV-out" on a PC card will feed the TV anything more.

[Awatef]

Your question is strange.
Actually, the higher the resolution the better it will look on TV.
May be you mean what minimum resolution you should use?
Well, I think it is safe to say that everything beyond 400x480 for NTSC and 400x576 for PAL is good enough, since S-Video signals are said to deliver about 400 lines horizontally.

[edit]
That reminds me (after reading Doobie's reply), may be you mean the screen resolution? that is 640x480 for NTSC or 800x600 for PAL. Anything else is no good :)

[CWR03]

If you're talking about video playback, the resolution won't matter since even 640 x 480 exceeds the clarity of a CRT TV. If you're talking about being able to read text or desktop icons, it simply depends on your TV. You'll just have to try it and see. You're not likely to find specs for using a CRT TV as a computer monitor.

[Waleska]

Thank you all for your hints. I plan to use it mainly for DVD playback. Just one more question, do regular tv's with smaller screen have as much resolution as tv's with bigger screens?.

Thank you again.

[Awatef]

Yes, but smaller TVs tend to look sharper ;)

[Shinigami-Sama]

depends
some OLDER CRTS that are 15 or less inches may even be 1/2 D1
so then you're realy screwed if you wanna run a desktop on it

[Soulhunter]

Dejavu... (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=822779#post822779) ^^


Bye

[Waleska]

I just connected the TV to the PC with a s-video2rca cable, but the desktop looked like 60 percect brighter than it should have, the right side of the screen wobbled like jello and if nothing was moving on it, a couple of apple-sized spots would appear and darken as time passed. The resolution used was 640x480.

Does anybody know what could be causing this mess?. Thanks again and sorry for the inconveniences.

[Shinigami-Sama]

over scan and
tv brightness != PC brightness

[Waleska]

How can I solve this problem if it actually can be solved?

[Shinigami-Sama]

change your TV's brightness
thats about it, or get used to it - I know I did

[Waleska]

That's no problem for me, I was talking abouut the wobbly screen and the darkening spots.

[Ebobtron]

wobbly screen and the darkening spots.
darkening spots:
darkening of an area of a standard TV screen is commonly caused by a malady called doming (make like a dome). Caused by the shadow mask of the picture tube receiving excess beam current because a purity misalignment causes the electron beam to strike more mask than phosphor.

wobbly screen:
and you also said it is very bright.
The time base used to create the sync pulses that your video card makes to create the s-video signal, should be very close to perfect. If we add the entire thing together. I wonder if the output is to hot (to high an output voltage).
A high input level could increase doming, overall brightness and overload the input circuits. High levels fed into the TV can produce distorted h sync cause the TV to hunt for the sync.

In the old days we used to run into impedance mismatches and improperly terminated video feds that acted a lot like this.

If you are using a real studio monitor and video monitor as compared to a standard TV, most monitors of the studio type allowed for the last one to be the terminator with the others hanging on the loop. Look on the jack pack for a switch.

or

Oh, I see your using a s-video 2 RCA cable. Some monitors had RCA input jacks. One more, if your monitor has video in jack and a video out jack make sure your using the video in jack and nothing is in the out jack.

How about a make and model on the TV.

If you can measure the video cards output with an oscilloscope.
The levels should be for the video 1 volt peak to peak from the bottom of the sync pulse to the top of a one hundred percent white peak. This measurement taken with a 75 ohm load on the video card.

The card could be bad.

While a computer can make a great DVD player / home theater engine for a great TV. A great TV is a lousy monitor for a computer, always.

So there is my guess, maybe you can tell us more.
Good luck,

[Waleska]

Thanks heaps for the info.

There's a lil detail I forgot to comment; the overbrightening does only happen when at the desktop, but as soon as I open a movie, application, whatever, it goes away. That must be a drivers issue for sure.

Also, if if there's something moving on screen, the darkening spot won't appear.

And as I said before, I'm not using a PC monitor, just a TV with the specs specified above.

I'm almost sure it's all about the cable being cheap because I tried connecting a svideo-compatible TV to my PC and it worked without problems.