Re: High Quality TV Card for my laptop

I think you have some misunderstangs.

A TV signal simply does not have 1400 x 1050 resolution. For NTSC (our current broadcast TV system), the maximum resolution that you can get from a composite off-the-air broadcast signal is about 320 to 350 lines horizontally by 480 (interlaced) lines vertically. That's all the quality that exists in the signal. So sure, you can "blow that up" to display it on a 1400 x 1050 monitor, but don't expect that you are going to see a 1400 x 1050 picture. In fact, blowing it up will only make it look worse, and will only make it clear just how low the resolution is.

[Note: Broadcast TV is a continuous analog medium so it really isn't possible to talk about horizontal resolution in terms of "pixels" as we talk about digital and comptuer images. But the NTSC system can only resolve about 320 to 350 lines (at most) from an off-the-air signal, which is very roughly about the same as 320 to 350 pixels (there's a difference, but it's subtle). Directly connected sources, like a DVD player connected with S-Video or component video, can do a little better (might reach 400 lines or a tad more or horizontal resolution), because they are not restricted to the bandwidth of a broadcast TV channel.

However, as to your second point, yes, it can be as good as a regular TV (but no better). Can be, but not all are.

The best interface for this is likely to be USB 2.0, although Firewire and a PC Card (the correct name for PCMCIA) could do it, but are not as commonly used in commercial products. A USB 1.x interface can't do it (there are such products and they work, but their quality suffers from the limited bandwidth of USB 1.x, and the loss is significant and noticeable). In my experience the Hauppauge products are the best.


u1000393@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Is there any TV Card (USB 2.0, Firewire, PCMCIA) that has the following
features:

1. Can be viewed at full screen (up to 1400 x 1050) without degrading
picture quality.
2. Picture and sound quality must be as good as a regular TV.

I am buying this to replace my TV, which is perfecly fine except that
it takes too much space. So, I want to sell it and save space by using
my notebook as my TV.
Any suggestion?

Hendra

.

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