TV Card question

[Mutilator]

Probably a stupid question but I'm going to ask it anyway.
After having to sell my HDTV I'm getting tired of watching my old 13" TV.
I'm trying to decide if I want to get a stand alone TV like the $250 24" Wega from Walmart, or a Compro Videomate Ultra TV card for my PC for $84 from Newegg.

My question is if I got the compro card what do you guys normally do if you want to watch TV on your monitor full screen? Does the tv card software stretch the image to fill the screen (1600x1200 resolution) or do you lower your resolution to 720x480?

I'm just trying to watch standard cable TV, not HDTV. My monitor is a 21" Sony Trinitron @ 1600x1200.

 

[Matthias99]

SDTV will look like crap on a computer monitor. Just warning you.

It's a ~640x480 signal, so blowing it up to fullscreen on a razor-sharp computer CRT will make it incredibly blocky and pixelated.

 

[Mutilator]

Yeah I know, that's why I was asking if you lower your monitor resolution down so full screen = native resolution.

Here's some pics of the compro @ 720x480:
Pics


Edit - After seeing one of your other posts about the video lag when using consoles thru svideo then I might be better off just getting a TV again. I don't hardly ever play consoles but when I do it'd be a racing or some other sports game most likely.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Mutilator
Yeah I know, that's why I was asking if you lower your monitor resolution down so full screen = native resolution.

It won't really help much. A 640x480 video feed at 20" diagonal is just never going to look good on a monitor (unless you're sitting like 8-10' away from it). If you use something like DScaler to upsample and blur it, it will look less terrible, but still pretty bad.

Here's some pics of the compro @ 720x480:
Pics

Yeah, but try blowing those shots up to fullscreen on a 19" or 21" monitor. It will look fine if it's small enough that the pixels don't individually stand out (like in a 640x480 window at 1600x1200 overall resolution), but if you make it that big, you can see every little flaw in the image.

 

[rbV5]

I use the video card to scale it to full screen no matter what display I'm using. Actually analog TV can look very good on a progressive scan monitor like a computer monitor or even a large display, its just dependant on a number of factors (like viewing distance/size of display) for instance

Those screenshots look real nice.

 

[Peter]

I'm currently watching plain PAL TV on a 20" Sony CRT. Looks good after deinterlacing, just don't sit too close, else the low resolution of the image feed becomes obvious.

When you're watching TV, you can use filtering software (and hardware if your gfx card does that) to smoothen things out - but if you're connecting a console game, you'll be disabling that to avoid lag.

The resolution on my screens is 1280x960 at 78 Hz, which isn't really optimal ... but it's a fixed-frequency ex-CAD monitor, and it can't do anything but that.

Perfect would be 640x480 at 60 Hz for NTSC, and 768x756 at 50 Hz for PAL - simply because that's the native number of display lines for these standards.

 

[keeleysam]

Originally posted by: Mutilator
I'm trying to decide if I want to get a stand alone TV like the $250 24" Wega from Walmart, or a Compro Videomate Ultra TV card for my PC for $84 from Newegg.

I'd buy the thing from Newegg, cuz walmart sucks bawls.

 

[Steve]

Originally posted by: Peter
Perfect would be 640x480 at 60 Hz for NTSC, and 768x756 at 50 Hz for PAL - simply because that's the native number of display lines for these standards.

768x576?

 

[Peter]

Yes of course 576. My right hand's faster than the left