Re: PAL/SECAM/NTSC TV tuner for ThinkPad 755C ???

[george@cs.nps.navy.mil (Robert George)]

>     I wonder if someone know about multi-system TV tuner for ThinkPad 755C?
> But idea is great...

IBM let me borrow one of the television tuners for a couple of days, and it
was acceptable, but it certainly didn`t justify the $1,999 price tag!

> We've ordered one but it's only NTSC so absolutely USELESS in Russia.

The tuner section has a switch to accept a composite (non-rf modulated)
signal.  Just use your own tuner, demodulate the signal (most modern tuners
have a composite output), and plug it into the composite jack.

It is interesting to note that the colors didn't look that great.  The
transistors in an active matrix LCD are analog (non-switching) transistors,
so you still need a D/A section to drive the panel from a digital input.
The driver chip in the ThinkPad uses 16,000 colors -- which you would think
would be sufficient, but the panel had a hard time with skin tones and
especially cartoons.

We were thinking of using the ThinkPad for the display on a remote driving
application for an autonomous robot, and found that the color was marginal
for this type of application.

| Robert George            |  Army Research Laboratory              |
| robertg@assb01.arl.mil   |  AMSRL-SS-IC                           |
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