Want to watch a little TV while working at your computer? The usual way to do it is to install a
tuner card in your PC and pop a window open on your monitor. But why sacrifice a slot or USB port, not to mention the
load on your processor, just for a little tube time? Why not just stick the tuner in the display itself, and be done
with it? That's what IO-Data has done, with the LCD-TV5C series, which includes 17 and 20-inch LCD displays, both of
which include built-in tuners, along with that all-important picture-in-picture function, so you can at least pretend
to still be working while you're catching up on "Space Ghost" reruns. Unfortunately, this looks to be a
Japan-only -- and terrestrial analog broadcast-only -- product (though there is an optional external Hi-vision tuner,
which sort of seems to defeat the whole purpose of this setup). Let's hope someone runs with the idea, though.
Otherwise, we may just have to DIY this one with an HD display that can double as a monitor -- though we fear we'll
lose that PIP function if we go that route.
[Via
Akihabara News]
posted Mar 1st 2006 9:19AM
Just got a Samsung SyncMaster 710MP from a cheap open box deal at Best Buy to use as my second display and/or TV on my desk. It's great to have a tuner built right in! Unfortunately, it doesn't have PIP, but the price was hard to beat. It has composite, s-video, and VGA ins as well as a 125 channel analog NTSC tuner.
The only issue I see here is that it is an analog tuner. This will only be useful for 1-3 years, as analog TV via cable will be phased out. I was informed by a Comcast tech that they plan to turn off analog in 2007 and you will be required to have a digital tuner box.
Yayyy!!!
Analog signal and not even US standards into a nice screen like that...
...next thing you know they'll be porting am radios into iPods!
> Why not just stick the tuner in the display itself, and be done with it? That's what IO-Data has done [...] Let's hope someone runs with the idea, though.
Samsung has indeed run with the idea, for at least five years now. The Syncmaster 170MP also supports RF, composite, S-video and VGA inputs and PIP.
A quick googling shows that, along with the Samsung 170MP and the 710MP mentioned by Andrew, monitors with TV tuners also include Daewoo L710T, LG M1910 and Philips 180MT13P. There are probably many others.
So why is this news? It's not even as interesting as a twig-shaped flash drive or yet another throwaway mp3 player.
So its a LCD TV duh . . . .
Also a tuner card gives better control over the Tv screen in resizing maximize, minimize etc.
uselss
I dont think I understand what it is. Or what it does. Or what I'm talking about.
Anyway heres what I'm looking at right now, PiP (Sportscenter! Woo!) and all. Please excuse my cell phones poor photo quality. Oh and if you poke around on my recent flickr stuff, there's a photo of what a bag of peanutbutter clodhoppers looks like when it's melted into one giant clod. Because Zellers really doesn't care.
http://flickr.com/photos/74599226@N00/106357733/
I have a dell monitor that is a few years old now that does this. It's got every type of input (except hdmi) supports 720p resolution and allows PiP of the TV when your working on the PC. I actually want to go find it again, and apparently Dell has discontinued it. Too bad, I absolutely love this monitor and TV combo
Uhh, just a get one of these:
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/compare.aspx/tv_cat2?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs
They're listed under TVs but I use mine mostly as a widescreen monitor, plus i plug in all my consoles to it (HD to boot:). It's got PIP too. This isn't anything new at all.