42"Plasma Display

[rbarratt@tygers]

Hi Folks,

I have what I hope is a fairly straightforward question. I have a 42” Sony Plasma display that I want to run of a pc. It will be used for web browsing, watching TV (TV turner card), playing DVDs, a bit of gaming and general PC stuff. The PC is a PII 650 with 256meg ram running XP. The Plasma resolution is 1024 *1024. At the moment the PC has an old, ok, NVidia TNT2 card. At 800 * 600 the picture is ok and at 1024/768 it is fairly poor. At this stage I am looking at the Millennium G550 card.

What I want to know is which of the Matrox cards is best to use with the Plasma? And are there any special gotcha’s I should know about?

Thanks
Ross

[Indiana]

You're connecting the plasma screen via SVHS?
Any Matrox card will have a much better display-quality and much better TVOut quality than any TNT2 card out there.

When comparing Matrox cards, the G400 has better TVOut than the G450, I don't know if the G550 is up to the G400-level again.

(P.S.: the Radeon7500 also has great TVOut, better than the R8500, unfortunately)

[Tempest]

And are there any special gotcha’s I should know about

Only the fact that your upgraded Matrox card won't play games any faster than your current TNT2...

[rbarratt@tygers]

Hi Indiana,

Thanks. The Plasma takes rgb in or svhs. I will try each but I suspect the rgb using a rgb vga cable will give the best result.

Cheers
Ross

[Indiana]

If the plasma can take RGB, yes, this is the way to go. But I belive you have to build this RGB-cable from the gfxcards output yourself. There was a scheme posted here for this quite some time ago, and IIRC there also a picture in the FAQ area on Matrox' website.

[Helevitia]

Here is what the connectors are for that display:

____________
Connectivity:

Mini D-sub 15 pin, S-video, composite video
Supports NTSC, PAL, SECAM, NTSC 4.43, PAL 60, HDTV (Y/PB/PR, RGB)
____________

Your problem is, plugging into S-video & composite video will make the screen look like crap no matter what video card you use. If the 15 pin connector is the normal computer connector, that is what you want to use. It will probably look pretty damn nice as a regular monitor. If you purchase an HDTV card for your computer, you can enjoy HD as well.

Dave

[Helevitia]

btw, the resolution is 3x1024x1024. Does that mean it is 3072x1024?

Dave

[Indiana]

Perhaps the "3" stands for 3 Bytes = 24Bits depth?

[Belwarrior]

Guys, I am in a similar situation. I am going to have a TV-out only PC system with my G400 and would like to know which driver version is best suited for it ( thought i saw a thread on this a couple of months back but cant seem to find it).
Thanks

[rbarratt@tygers]

Hi Folks,

A bit of an update.

I have installed the Millennium G550. It is working well but there are limitations with the setup. The Sony Plasma works well at 800x600 but at 1024x768 the flicker is too much. This is a bit limitting for some things but for the TV tuner and DVDs it is pretty good. There is still a bit of flicker and blur. I suspect the Plasma is optimised for svideo rather than svga.

Given the feature list of the Marvel G450 etv I am tempted to give that a go. For TV and DVD I suspect the svideo out (svhs) on this card will give a smoother, if lower resolution, picture. Has anybody had any experience with this card?

Cheers
Ross

[Guru]

ftp://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/utils/t...mtstu40409.zip

Try the above program to set custom resolutions and refresh rates!