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Monitor for TV/Computer

L

Laurel

Junior Member
I am just looking for some guidance on selecting two monitors for a computer (per the company boss), video cards, and possibly software. I need the following functionality:

1) One of the monitors will always be used as the main monitor for the computer while the other monitor will mainly be used as a television (owner can work on the computer while watching Wallstreet Week).

2) Option to use both monitors as a split screen (one big screen spread over the monitors - more traditional use of two monitors).
3) Ability to have both screens displaying the same information (great for displaying what the owner is doing on the computer - a good teaching tool).

Not trying to buy a Porsche, but price is not a huge issue ($500-$1000 a monitor is acceptable). Any suggestions would be highly appreciated as I'm trying to avoid the "just buy stuff and see how it works" methodology.

Thanks!
 
Welcome!

I'd use two proper monitors, identical ones, and put a PCI TV card into the attached computer. That plus a perfectly normal dual-output graphics card. You'll get big desktop, clone, and "theater"* mode where the 2nd display shows some media (DVD, TV, whatever) fullscreen while the other one continues to work as a monitor.

Scale your monitor purchase by budget, and use a fairly low-specification graphics card with the appropriate outputs (DVI for panels, VGA or DVI for CRTs).

* That's what ATI calls it. Others have different names for the same thing.
 
$500-1000 per monitor? Id go with a pair of Dell LCD's then.

A pair of 1905 FP's would be great, or you could go top of the line and get a pair of 2005 FPW's for some widescreen goodness.

For the Graphics card, I would look at a low end Radeon or Geforce card with dual DVI outputs, like the Radeon 9600, Radeon x700, or the Geforce 6600 (non-gt). These guys are priced around $130.

For the TV Tuner card, there are basically two flavors, cards with hardware video encoding, and cards without. This is only really importnat if you want to use the computer like a VCR and record tv shows. Cards with hardware video encoding have a special chip on the tuner card that will process and record the video from the analog tv signal into a digital file on your hard drive. Cards without a hardware encoding ship put the encoding burden on your CPU. If your not interested in recording, and all your user plans to do is watch TV, then a hardware encoding chip is not really important. TV tuners without a hardware encoding chip are quite a bit cheaper.So my reccomendations are:

TV Tuners with hardware encoding
Saphire Theater 550
Hauppauge PVR-150

TV Tuner without hardware encoding
Lifeview Fly video 2000
 
Great help, but an additional question. Is there any software where I could actually record the shows (my own Tivo type item)?
 
The software that comes with the current breed of TV cards offers these things. Some cards even have hardware MPEG2 encoders on the card, offloading the CPU from that task.
 
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