Gordon Laing

Every product range has a sweet spot where a particular model delivers especially good value. Dropping to the next model down rarely saves much, while upgrading to the next one costs you more. It’s all down to component supply, market demand and, of course, manufacturing volumes.

As the manufacturers gear up for autumn/winter sales, nowhere is this better illustrated than large-screen plasma or LCD TVs, whose sweet spot over the next year is the 42in category – give or take an inch or two. Dropping to 37in saves you little apart from space, while the next step up to 50in requires a significantly higher investment.

I believe one of the big selling points of a large LCD or plasma screen is the possibility of connecting a PC. After all, most are equipped with analogue VGA or digital DVI ports.

I’m not suggesting word processing on the big screen, I’m talking about occasionally using it for playing PC games, viewing digital photo slideshows or as the display for a Media Center system – and I’m sure many PCW readers in the market for a new big TV have had the same thought.

But while plasma and LCD TVs with their cornucopia of interfaces may seem equipped for almost any source, there’s more to delivering a decent PC image than having the right plug. This would be obvious if we were talking about PC monitors, yet even the most basic specifications, such as native resolutions and aspect ratios, are often glossed over when discussing big-screen TVs.

Most stores will simply say that if it has a PC plug, it will work with a PC. But as anyone who’s bought a flat panel monitor knows, native resolution is a crucial specification. This refers to the number of pixels on the panel itself, such as 1,280 x 1,024, and while a panel can be driven at other resolutions, this involves scaling with often undesirable image artefacts. For the best quality you should always drive a panel at its native resolution. No-one would argue with this in the PC monitor market, yet trying to do the same with a large-screen, flat-panel TV can be fraught with problems and compromise.

In the past, many TV panels sported native resolutions which weren’t supported by PC graphics cards. If you were willing to tweak you may have been able to generate a custom mode using special software such as Powerstrip, but for most people it was way too complicated.

More recently, many large-screen TVs have offered resolutions that match standard PC modes, such as 1,024 x 768. At the same time, updated graphics card drivers have become more flexible, offering a wide array of modes designed to drive HDTVs. Both developments allow more screens than ever to be driven by PCs at their native resolution, but the result may not be what you hoped for.

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!