Tv as a substitute monitor?

[Live-evil]

I just bought a TV with a S-video socket. Can I use it as a alternative for my Monitor? My Video card's socket for the Monitor supports S-Video

[guns1inger]

You can, but you won't do it for long. Although you can sender higher res downs-video, realistically you can't read text at anything higher than around 800 x 600, and even then it is pretty indistinct.

[edDV]

For NTSC it will be even worse at ~640x480 analog even though the display resolution is 800x600 before analog conversion.

Here is the best I was able to do capping the ATI Radeon S-Video out to the ADVC-100 DV transcoder. A TV will look worse.

800x600 -> S-Video -> ADVC-100 -> DV frame cap.

[ZAPPER]

Gonna look like caca. It's a shame too, it would seem that there would be some program that would do a half way decent job of converting things to look better, but I don't know of any.

[DereX888]

Well, the first and most determining question should be:
what kind of TV have you bought?
Is it old fashion style tube TV, or is it LCD-based TV, or perhaps a plasma-based screen TV
Obviously if you have LCD or plasma TV there is no problem, although its not a best solution to feed the video thru s-video (assuming i.e. your plasma's tuner have such input), you could go with 960x600 or at least 720x480, but still I wouldn't understand why go that way, hmm...
For analog NTSC you shouldn't go higher than 800x600 (unless you want to play with screen panning), and obviously such picture is too soft and too washed out to read any text etc comfortably.

[fLYtRap]

You can, but you won't do it for long. Although you can sender higher res downs-video, realistically you can't read text at anything higher than around 800 x 600, and even then it is pretty indistinct.

I use my TV as a comp screen and its just fine. That all depand how good is the TV you bought.

[guns1inger]

I assume, unless someone says LCD or Plasma, that a TV with s-video is just a plain old CRT. No matter how good that may be, using s-video you will get crap as far as using it as a monitor is concerned. I have a damn fine CRT TV. I have hooked my laptop up to is on many occasions, and have even sent much higher resolutions through s-video to it. That does not make it a long or even short term solution. If they do have LCD or Plasma, why use s-video ?

[fLYtRap]

I assume, unless someone says LCD or Plasma, that a TV with s-video is just a plain old CRT. No matter how good that may be, using s-video you will get crap as far as using it as a monitor is concerned. I have a damn fine CRT TV. I have hooked my laptop up to is on many occasions, and have even sent much higher resolutions through s-video to it. That does not make it a long or even short term solution. If they do have LCD or Plasma, why use s-video ?

I'm using CRT TV that I bought in 1999 for $700.00. That was a lot of money for a TV back than, but I choose that particullar TV because I wanted to use it as a monitor for my computer, which one I finally bought it in 2001. With that in mind I didn't need to buy a monitor, all I need it in my PC was a S-Video out to view it on my TV. I'm still using bouth of them today.

[JerryB]

hi,
well my thoughts....
your pc monitor has a much more better resolution than your tv set.... an hense the display will be poorer on a tv....

with that said... the reason...
the vast majority of your standard tv's scan at 525 lines with 500 dots, internlaced !! so unless it a small sreen display things will look a little blurry on large screens... your monitor, there a lot more dots and there closer together....
won't talk about the ntsc standards... that gets more involved...smile...

now there are some large tv crt screens that will scan at higher line line rate, i had a old 32" magnivox and it scanned at appx 800 lines!! and also use progressive scanning techniques which isn't found very oftenin your tv's.!! that gives you a sharper picture quality than your regular tv sets..

however. the day not far where screen will be used both for pc and tv viewing.... already we have your lcd and plasma screens... which are being used for tv viewing... and you can hook up your pc to these and get reasonable good picture quality... the big bump will be when vista come out and all the perphieal hardware is upgraded.... to where your using a hdtv screen for both pc and tv viewing.... the quality will much better...!!

I just bought a TV with a S-video socket. Can I use it as a alternative for my Monitor? My Video card's socket for the Monitor supports S-Video

[edDV]

When you select "resolution" on the S-video output you are only defining the size of the desktop before digital to analog conversion. For S-Video out, analog Y (luminance) bandwidth (i.e. analog detail) is reduced to about 640x480 equivalent and is interlace. C (chroma) bandwidth is reduced much further to about 1 MHz or about 80x480. That is why color appears smeared. Text will look poor unless font size is increase to typical TV sizes.

By contrast, a SVGA (800x600) output from the graphics card's RAMDAC to VGA RGB will display at full progressive resolution on a computer monitor.