Computer Optional For AOC's New HD Display 118
MojoKid writes "As a 22-inch, HD flat-panel display, AOC's new 2230Fm LCD has nothing necessarily earth-shattering about its design. But what got our attention was the marketing tag for the device: 'No PC Required.' It turns out that, in addition to being a traditional flat-screen LCD with a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 (HDCP ready), the 2230Fm also includes a built-in media player, with what AOC calls its HD3 technology. The 2230Fm supports MPEG-1, 2, and 4 video formats. Supported audio formats include MP3, WMA, WAV, OGG, FLA, and M4A. Supported photo formats include JPG, TIFF, PNG, BMP, and GIF images with resolutions up to 8000 x 8000 pixels. The display also has a low 2ms response time and high 20,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio."
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Run? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Run? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does it run? It would be interesting if it was embedded Linux, because there would be so much you could do with it (server, etc)
Do you mean to ask "But does it run L****?"?
I don't really care what it runs. It's a slashvertizment. Call me when C|Net or Taco or Ars or someplace that I've heard of reviews it.
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The funny thing is... it's not even a new technology. It's been done... my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary... It can be hooked up to a USB hard drive, and display pictures, play mp3s, and other media content. *shrugs*
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my 42" LG 42LB5D has a feature that's eerily similar to what's described in the summary...
So does my $10 digital picture frame...
Re:Run? (Score:4, Interesting)
Where did you get a digital picture frame for $10?
Re:Run? (Score:5, Interesting)
My Philips has the same thing. Plus it runs embedded Linux. Philips complied with the GPL by including a flyer with the TV telling me how to get the source code.
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It probably runs Java on a low powered CPU such as the Z80 or 6502.
It's the latest "Just-In-Time" virtual machines that make it possible, dynamically recompiling the video codecs at runtime to give unprecedented optimizations.
Even the very best hand optimized home-theatre video codec assembler can't approach one-fifteenth of the speed of a Java application.
Over medium turn runs of a few months, it's been known for the entire mpeg-4 codec to be optimized down to just a hand full of instructions.
This is one o
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What does it run? It would be interesting if it was embedded Linux, because there would be so much you could do with it (server, etc)
Embedded Vista, you can't do anything with it.
Re:Run? (Score:5, Funny)
Cancel or Allow?
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Looks like it is just some sort of limited entertainment center. Watch some movies and that is it; no nic, browser, wifi. So, it is like looking at a DVD player and saying no PC required. Sum it up; it plays video, its a monitor with no DVD reader. Whats the point? TV/DVD player combos are (sadly) more useful.
FYI: You can plug it into a PC/Mac:
"PC/Windows, Mac® Equipped With Analog VGA D-sub or DVI Port"
Build a low profile PC with MythTV; connect it to a large screen LCD/Plasma TV and you're bet
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I agree with everything in your post except I don't think it will sell all that well.
Mainly because the screen is too small to be a replacement for my living room TV (yes, I'm basing my analysis on what I want). It might be useful in the den or the workroom however as you point out there are other and better alternatives.
If they doubled the size of the screen I might consider it otherwise it's just a gadget for people with more money than common sense.
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It would have been worthy of saying "No PC required" if it had a Via EPIA mini-ITX board and Linux on a CF card inside, or something like that.
This way, the whole post is just a poor advertisement.
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My HDTV runs Linux. It's got the slow startup time to prove it too!
I have yet to figure out where a back door might be, it's got a USB port but it's apparently only for doing firmware upgrades and it doesn't look like there are any hacked firmwares around.
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Would have been even better (Score:2)
if it was a IPS panel and not a TN Panel :(
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This is very true -- and that native resolution is pretty sub-par as well. For a monitor that size I'd like to see an absolute minimum of 1920x1200 pixels. I'm pretty spoiled by the 17" 1920x1200 monitor in my macbook pro -- even though it is TN, it is very, very sharp.
Also this thing apparently has no led backlighting either.
All in all, this is a real yawner. Wake me up when someone has a 23 or 24 inch led backlight monitor with true 8 or 10 bits per channel, and a dot pitch in excess of 130/inch.
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Oh and it costs under $100.
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It will sell for an MSRP of $399.99 and should be available in the U.S. next month.
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Ummm, Read the parent. :P
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Ummm, Read the parent. :P
Priceless... (You owe me a keyboard but, for everything else there's MasterCard.)
Ummmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Well I think you need to do a little more research first. The resolution isn't sub-par at all. Par would mean normal, median, average, etc. A little research turns up that essentially every 22" desktop monitor is 1680x1050. So the resolution is right on par.
As for LED backlighting, are you kidding me? That is currently very expensive. It's neat and all, but you aren't going to see it outside of either laptops (where the reduction in thickness and power is worth it) or extremely high end displays (where the increase in colour gamut is worth it). At present you need to be willing to drop serious cash to get such a display.
I also don't get all the hating on cheap monitors. Are LCDs something only the rich should be allowed to have? No? Then stop bitching when companies want to make budget displays. You want a better monitor? Go get one. There's plenty out there. I personally have an NEC 2690 and I just love it. Highly recommended. However, don't cry when you can't have it for $400.
There's a market for high end displays, and a market for cheap ones. If you aren't interested in a given segment, ignore it, but don't hate on those that are. Some people don't have thousands to spend on a display and want a monitor for a couple hundred, even if that means a cheap TN panel.
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Point me at a monitor that can be had for *any* amount of money which fits my criteria -- >= 23" diagonal, >= 130 dpi, led backlight, >= 8 bits/channel. I haven't found one. Yes that one is "par" by your definition -- but then I happen to think that the vast majority of monitors out there are horrible. I'm not asking for one that meets my spec to be cheap -- I'd be willing to pay serious money for it. The closest I've ever seen was IBMs T221 -- but it was not led backlit, only 22 inch, and it was *
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Re:Ummmm (Score:4, Insightful)
You haven't found it yet because you want the latest greatest right now. That doesn't always happen. Drop the LED requirement and you can probably have what you want. Likewise, you can also get 10-bit colour and LED backlight, if you are willing to take a lower resolution in the form of the HP LP2480zx. However part of life is compromises. You can't always have everything you want. If you can't deal with that, well then you have some maturity problems. You can have most of what you want (3 of 4 criteria) if you are willing to pay for it. So deal with that.
Regardless my original point still stands, don't hate on things just because they aren't high end. Maybe not everyone wants as much as you do. There's nothing wrong with that, there's no reason to hate on normal consumer technology just because you want something high end. That's just being a snob. If this monitor isn't for you that's fine, but it is no reason to make a post dissing it.
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Well I think you need to do a little more research first. The resolution isn't sub-par at all. Par would mean normal, median, average, etc. A little research turns up that essentially every 22" desktop monitor is 1680x1050. So the resolution is right on par.
As for LED backlighting, are you kidding me? That is currently very expensive. It's neat and all, but you aren't going to see it outside of either laptops (where the reduction in thickness and power is worth it) or extremely high end displays (where the
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I dunno for sure but it seems a lot of manufacturers aren't making IPS pannels. Do they want to attact more customers with lower priced pannels? Low Supply? Or larger markup/margins with less expensive pannels? All the above?
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Slashvertise much? (Score:3, Insightful)
How is this "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters" exactly?
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Yes, I see. A single story about an interesting new product that is actually related to computers is "Slashvertisement", but the regular Iphone adverts we get here all the time are stuff that matters.
Some standardization would be nice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, whatever board is working its magic in this AOC, and similar, is a full blown computer. I'm not sure about this case; but a fair few of these have a network stack, browser, and everything. Do you want to depend on a monitor vendor for security updates and bugfixes? Do you want to learn that the board embedded in your pricey display has all the personality quirks of a cut-rate DVD player from the wrong side of the bargain bin? Any sort of real integration with other systems, which would open all sorts of really interesting possibilities, is likely to be either a)a gigantic pain in the ass and kinda flakey, b)specifically blessed by the vendor and all the gods for this and only this use case and accompanying software, or c) Not Happening Buddy.
Going ahead and turning these things into full blown computers probably isn't the answer; but it would be very, very nice to see some sort of standardization, option for user access to the guts, etc. Appliances have their place; but they really do limit the possibilities of a given situation.
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I don't think there's (much of) a computer in there. Just a bunch of specialized decoder hardware, plus a low-powered "computer" for the UI. It doesn't come equipped with network hardware, either. I think it's an appealing product to me, cause it's probably noiseless (I don't like that extra-hum when I'm watching something), and I can switch off an energy-wasting appliance while watching videos. It probably renders videos better than many older computers anyway.
My only gripe with it is that its resolution i
Re:Full blown computer (Score:2, Interesting)
If there was a full-blown computer inside the beast, they would not be able to sell it for 400 bucks.
What most people do not see is that most of the work inside a flat-screen TV today is done by software anyways. There is an assembly of chips, one for the tuner, one for decoding digital streams, one for analog stuff and some memory, and what holds all of it together is software.
If you have the computing power to run the TV with all its control logic and OSD, plus the decoder DSP you need anyways to process
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Obviously, whatever board is working its magic in this AOC, and similar, is a full blown computer.
Not necessarily. Theres a range on multimedia players that have similar specs and are running on DVD player type hardware.
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...(particularly given that the slightly uglier but much, much more standard option of an embedded PC in a VESA mount is always waiting in the wings)...
You mean like this [logicsupply.com]?
Nice revenue generator for HotHardware (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow, nice way to drive traffic to hothardware.com. Is HotHardware paying Slashdot for the traffic or are Slashdot editors just not so bright.
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Why not? HotHardware's money is just as good as Roland Piquepaille's, you know.
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No?
Reminds me of that laptop I saw once. (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw a laptop some years back which had a CD player separate from the computer; if you had a CD in the drive, you could spin it up and plug in headphones to get tunes out of it without powering up the whole machine.
Sounds pretty similar, I think. I didn't see the point of it then, either.
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Call it the iPod Meter and people will be all over it.
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CD-ROM drives used to have play/pause/skip buttons back in the day. Just power on and stick the disc in. All my first CD and DVD drives had this feature in the previous millennium. Now you need a functioning OS to play discs, for the most part (although the BIOS on at least two of my systems recognise and play discs with MP3s).
That's because they used to handle the audio (Score:3, Informative)
Some computers didn't even have soundcards, and those that did certainly weren't going to handle the CD audio. So the CD player itself handled all playback and converted it to analogue audio, which you then listened to by either plugging headphones in to the CD player or running a wire to the sound card which then mixed it (again in analogue). All the OS did in terms of CD playback was tell it to start to play the disc.
Little different now. You'll discover that many CD players lack analogue outs at all, and
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I saw a laptop some years back which had a CD player separate from the computer; if you had a CD in the drive, you could spin it up and plug in headphones to get tunes out of it without powering up the whole machine.
Sounds pretty similar, I think. I didn't see the point of it then, either.
That reminds me of a laptop I read about a couple years ago, except in this case you could watch a DVD without booting into the OS. I haven't heard anymore about it, or similar laptops since.
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ALL current Dell laptops have this featue - it's called Dell Media Direct. You can run Powerpoint presentations in there too.
"HD" is useless (Score:1, Insightful)
No 720-line standard should have ever earned the "HD" moniker. The term "HD" should be reserved for displays and sources with resolution of 1920x1080 or greater. Real HD sources will look like ass on this display.
Life would have been much clearer if we had called 720p "extended definition" instead of HD. A lot of people would have been saved from buying lousy TVs and monitors.
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I'm happy with my 720P TV. I have a 1080P as well. I can live with my 720P TV but i would rather it be 1080P. So i agree with you. What pisses me off most is, HD TV is broadcast in 720P, but heavily compressed. I have FIOS, and FIOS TV and there is a lot of grain and compression artifacts in fast motion on HD TV broadcasts such as sports etc.
You can easily see the compressed signal. I'm not sure its from FIOS to save bandwidth (probably is), or if its from the source... (probably is).
Whatever the case is...
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HDTV broadcast over the air is not compressed, the picture is phenomenal, and the subscription fee consists of purchasing an antenna.
Otherwise I'd recommend going satellite. I had HDTV, free 6 month offer, from the local cable provider and the compression was horrific. HDTV from satellite is a world better if that's your only other way to get a signal. But over the air is by far the best available.
ATSC is compressed (Score:3, Informative)
HDTV broadcast over the air is not compressed
Citation sorely needed. "Uncompressed" is what gets sent over your DVI or HDMI cable: 1920x1080 pixels, 3 channels, 8 bits per channel, 24 distinct frames per second, or 1.2 Gbps. To squeeze this into the roughly 19.39 Mbps provided by the 8VSB physical layer, ATSC DTV uses MPEG-2 video compression [wikipedia.org].
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HDTV broadcast over the air is not compressed
Broadcast HDTV is most certainly compressed. The ATSC standards utilize MPEG-2 compression over 8VSB modulation to give a ~20 Mbps channel per transmitter, whereas cable companies can use 16VSB, 256-QAM or better modulation to give a 40+ Mbps channel. Couple that with the fact that most broadcasters transmit multiple streams (subchannels like 9-1, 9-2, 9-3, etc) which each take up some of that 20 Mbps, and OTA HD broadcasts get ridiculously compressed.
Satellite providers are just as bad, trying to send H
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yeah my biggest fear is the cable cos will over compress everything resulting in very poor television. I mean if they cant handle the few HD channels they have now, how will they handle the full load?!!?
Its something to be worried about because these corporations are against upgrading bandwidth. They'll do anything to avoid doing so. It's bound to bring us very poor signals in the future at ridiculously higher prices.
Re:"HD" is useless (Score:5, Interesting)
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From abc.com [go.com]
I don't care to look up the others, but feel free.
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ABC/ESPN chose 720p because they claimed it handled live motion sequences like sporting events better than 1080i. NBC and CBS are both in 1080i, I believe. I think Fox is 720p as well.
I can't tell what the native resolutions are any more since my Motorola box from FiOS upscales everything to 1080i. Personally I'd rather let the scaler in my nice Sony HDTV handle this function rather than some crappy circuitry in a set-top box. Comcast, in contrast, used a Moto box that passed through the HD signals and
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Life would have been much clearer if we had called 720p "extended definition" instead of HD.
I've started to use the names "basic HDTV" for 720-line monitors and "premium HDTV" for 1080-line monitors.
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We just started (December/07) our HDTV air-borne transmissions.
But then Brazil taxes electronics the way the UK taxes petrol: almost more tax than the cost of goods.
a broadcaster chose to crop today the borders of the movie Robots (Pixar?) to make it 4:3.
Robots is not Disney/Pixar; it's Fox. But at least Pixar is known for "reframing" its movies for 16:9 and 4:3, choosing whether to pan and scan [wikipedia.org] or open the matte [wikipedia.org] on each shot. In that case, it's not necessarily the broadcaster's decision to crop it.
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Compared with 480i, 720p is definitely "high definition."
Should be 1920x1080 (Score:2)
Looks like a Mac to me (Score:2)
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The identically-specced white Macbook is $50 cheaper, IIRC.
Ooh, HD movies from an SD card. (Score:3, Insightful)
the future of pc (Score:1)
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So what you want is the iMac without an optical drive and with an SSD.
i'd buy that for my entertainment system!
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Umm, the extra bits stick out maybe 1 to 1-1/4 inches beyond the back. Can I ask where you're finding 2 or 3 inch thick CRTs?
It's a digital picture frame (Score:1, Insightful)
So this is really another digital picture frame.
Skype, web? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Hey ... we finally got something else that plays Ogg Vorbis!
I'd pass... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Is it DRM-free? (Score:1)
Does the embedded player contain DRM? If not, it sounds like a great piece of gear! If it's crippled with DRM, it has about as much value as microsoft's media player to me: $0.
Where's that wallpaper from? (Score:2)
I like it. Anyone know where it's from?
Why not be open? (Score:2)
So what's new (Score:2)
LG scarlet line of LCD HDTVs already do it (google for "lg scarlet" - I am too lazy to type in the URL :-). It needs a FAT filesystem on a USB HDD. Samsung Series 6 and Series 5 LCD TVs do it - though it's doesn't do divx movies (LG model does). This is clearly a slashvertisement.
Optional? (Score:2)
"HDCP ready"? (Score:1)
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It means that you can hook it up to an HDCP-ready video card and play stuff that requires HDCP. Most monitors intended for media playback have this now.
Much Easier? (Score:1)
Isn't it infinitely much easier just to load a DVD into a tray, than it is to rip a DVD, copy it onto a storage device, and plug it into a TV?
It's m
kind of embarassing... (Score:2)
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S-IPS? No. MVA? No. (Score:2)
What's the big deal? (Score:1)
I knew it! (Score:2)
tv's (Score:1)
This functionality is actually somewhat common in current high end televisions.
Big deal. My parents' Toshiba CRT TV can do it. (Score:1)
I don't see why this is news. My parents have a Toshiba 30" CRT TV with a media card reader in it that plays the cards and any media on it as if it were playing a DVD or VHS tape. Why is this new technology?
Oh... I get it. This is an advertisement disguised as a news item.
But seriously, WTF, /.? I'm fairly new to /. so this s**t may be going on all the time for all I know, but this really is low. Advertisements should be advertisements, news items should be news items (we get it, guys. And we do click ads y
2ms response time? (Score:2)
I'm guessing this will be one of the models that uses dithering to fake its claimed "millions of colors."
Yes.. but... (Score:3, Funny)
Big screen TVs such as these give them hope and strength to push on in hope that one day, they too will have a wall with a socket to plug a TV such as that into.