Potential new Monitor

[P-Dub]

Mag HV175 17" Widescreen LCD HDTV

This is something that I'm looking at getting, once my 17" CRT dies a 'natural' death.

It's currently on sale at Futureshop for C$399.99.

Why I'm looking for something like this.

Dual purpose, watch TV or use as a secondary computer monitor.

I only use a resolution of 1024x768 on a standard 17" monitor.

[P-Dub]

I did buy this unit last week and finally hooked it up for a quick test last night. To put it bluntly I was dissapointed. Maybe my expectations were too high.

TV performance: As a basic LCD TV, it was adequate. Nothing outstanding, I noticed the picture was not very crisp when view off axis. The best way I would describe it would be a poor LCD pannel. Almost like a passive matrix LCD from the old laptop days.

It has a button on the remote that allows you to adjust the set for 4:3 or 16:9. For regular TV viewing you would set it at 4:3 and have black bars on the sides. In 16:9 mode it just streatches the image to fit the screen.

DVD: This was a dissapointment. I hooked it up via component and for some reason the image flickered like the dickens. It sensed the output from my player as 480i. But the set could not adjust accordingly to display a smooth picture. Sure I could upgrade my DVD player, but I don't want to at the moment. I also used a S-Video connection, and the picture was better. No flickering, but the picture quality was not much better than a regular cable TV signal. I was using Matrix as my source and the DVD player was a Toshiba 3109.

Computer monitor: This was really the main reason that I purchased this unit. I hooked it up no problem, but I could only get it to 1024x768. So in the 4:3 mode, I would have black bars around the side or I could have a distorted image in 16:9 mode. I thought it would do 1280x768, but I could figure it out. There were no drivers included in the box, and the drivers off the website were mainly for the LCD producs. I only used it on my laptop to quickly test the image quality, so maybe my video card in my desktop would be better. I have Matrox G550 that supports different resoulutions, but I really didn't want to mess about with it.

So this set will be going back. My high expectations were that this would be a great secondary monitor, as my current monitor is a NEC 15" LCD. Well my 3 year old LCD monitor has a superior picture compared to this unit. All the other abilities, like a built in TV tuner, component in, etc would be a nice bonus. Well it didn't seem to do anything well and at the end of the day I really want a good second monitor.