I bought an MVA computer monitor to replace my office TV that wouldn’t play nice with my Cisco cable box, but it cam with a gotcha.
Apparently computer monitors can’t accept the 480i format like TVs can, so I can’t view standard definition channels anymore. The cable box does have an option to convert everything to 1080i, but I’d rather not enable it because it would degrade 720P sources.
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The monitor has the following inputs: Displayport, DVI (in use for the cable box), VGA. The cable box has the following outputs: HDMI (in use for the monitor), video, S-Video, and component. Attaching the HDMI cable to a valid source disables the component output for some reason, but the others are unaffected.
Sounds like the neatest way to do this would be an S-video to VGA 1080i converter, so I could just flip the input switch on the monitor, but I’m not sure such a thing exists.
Generally speaking, nothing HD can display 480i anymore (and it probably does some filtering to even display 1080i… interlacing is dead.)
Where are you getting the SD signal from? If it’s a DVD player, see if it has an option to upconvert to 480p, which should display ok.
EDIT: wait your cablebox is sending out 480i? Hm. I don’t have cable, so I’ll let someone else comment on that, but that seems weird and wrong-- not least of which is because (as you’re finding out) very few TVs/monitors support it anymore!
that’s going to be your best solution, assuming the monitor can accept 1080i. and (IMO) worrying about “degrading” 720p sources on something the size of a PC monitor is silly.
TVs almost universally still support it. PC monitors haven’t for quite some time. my cable box is a bit older, but it still has the option of either scaling 480i internally, or sending it out as-is and letting the TV deal with it.
My monitor’s 24" and I sit like 3’ away. I could see being concerned about that.
Interesting. Years ago when I still watched TV, I had one that didn’t do 480i. I remember having to fiddle with my (1st generation) Xbox because while it had HD mode in-game, it would still output 480i while in the dashboards and my TV would show nothing but black. They finally patched that, and fixed it in the Xbox 360.
I guess I kind of just assumed that was the “wave of the future”, and since I only buy computer monitors now I’m not up-to-date on what TVs are like anymore.