TV-Out

Those outputs are for games and presentations where you have slides wth big letters. Most TVs don't have very good resolution so anything more then 640x480 is not going to look good. By the time you get the resolution low enough to be seen on TV you can only see a tiny part of your program. I had a 700 line TV once and it looked OK at 800x600 but still nothing like a real computer monitor.

Modern HDTVs are better. I have a 42" plasma that is 1024x768 native so it looks perfect just like a computer monitor. It also has a VGA input so there is no need to use a special video card. I don't use it very often because I don't want to burn in any images on it but for a quick check of e-mail it's kinda cool. Keep in mind a lot of lower end plasma screens are only 800x600 so they are still no where near a real computer montior.

ORIGINAL: polarbear

thats so ****ty though... it's like they can't really expect everyone that buys a "cheap $70" video card with tv-out, to have a "$5000+" tv... it just doesn't make sense.. isn't there some kind of converting of signal going on to make it look good? blah!

Yes, it can convert the signal but the TV only has so many lines of resolution so it's the TVs fault. They just don't tell you that If you set your desktop to 640 x 480 you might see part of it clearly LOL !

By the way my TV was only $3000 not $5000+, they don't cost as much as they used to. However, if you are going to use it with your computer get LCD not plasma. It's not as fast as plasma but it doesn't burn in.

Those video card outs are used by people editing video on an NLE (computer) system. They do that because a computer monitor has a much brighter picture because of its higher color temperature. You can mess around with your video card's contrast/brightness etc., to try and make it look more like a TV but its generally easier to just run a line from your video card (or firewire through a camcorder) to a TV to test the picture so you know its going to look right on a standard TV when you're done editing.

Also, computer monitors use square pixels. TV's use rectangular pixels. One will always look a little out of kilter on the other unless you stretch the picture somehow. If I wanted to show you a still frame grab from a typical 720 x 480 DVD or miniDV, then I'd have to stretch the pic to 720 x 540 for it to look correct on a computer screen.

There's actually a bit more to it than that but, the bottom line is: TV's aren't good for regular computer viewing.

Many of us use the S-Video out so we can watch all of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes we've downloaded.

That way I can have a bunch of friends over and we can sit on the couch instead of trying to watch on the computer screen. I can run the audio from the computer to my surround receiver.