Monday, September 26, 2005

Samsung LN-R238W Setup

So, the Samsung finally came in. It's a nice unit. The 23" size is just a bit large for my small home office, but the price was nice. It would also make a nice unit for a bedroom or small living room. The fun part is that it shows the deficiencies of DVDs that haven't been encoded well (or I need a better DVD player).

Hooking it up to the DVD player using the component video cables is easy. Getting it hooked up to the PC, not so much.

Basically, there are the following sets of inputs on the Samsung LN-R238W. All of these are on the back of the unit. One downside of the LN-R238W is that all connectors are on the back, which makes it difficult to hook/unhook devices easily. (Even the headphone jack is on the back of the unit.)

Component 1: (3) RCA cables for red/green/blue components and (2) RCA cables for audio. I've hooked this set up to my DVD player.

Component 2: (3) RCA cables for red/green/blue components and (2) RCA cables for audio.

HDMI/DVI: (2) RCA connectors for the audio, plus an HDMI connection. You can also use a DVI to HDMI cable to connect a DVI device to the HDMI input. According to the manual, "HDMI/DVI IN terminal does not support PC".

PC input: (1) 1/8" stereo connector for the audio, plus a VGA 15-pin female connector.

A/V 1: (2) RCA connectors for the audio and either an RCA composite connector for the video or an S-Video connector.

A/V 2: (2) RCA connectors for the audio and an RCA composite connector for the video.

Plan A: Hook my PC to the HDMI input

My first impulse was to hook the 2nd output (a DVI output) on my GeForce Ti4600 to the HDMI input. That lets me use both my 19" CRT (1600x1200) and use the LCD TV as a secondary display.

I had moderate luck connecting the DVI output on my PC to the HDMI input on the Samsung. But, I've only been able to run it at 1280x720 (720p) and it's getting scaled by the Samsung circuitry up to something larger. In addition, the image is overscanned so that the edges of the windows desktop are off the edge of the screen.

The NVIDIA settings do allow you to treat the display as an HDTV. You can then change the overscan settings and fit the display onto the screen properly. You'll end up with an odd-sized screen that will then get scaled up to display on the LCD TV. It works well for video, but not so well for text/PC work.

The second issue is that some programs (InterVideo WinDVD 4) will not display video onto a secondary display. But Zoom Player (www.inmatrix.com) does manage to do it properly, so I'll probably use that to display video.

I've played with timings and settings quite a bit, but the HDMI input only wants to accept HDTV resolutions (as in 720p or 1080i). And even then, you're still dealing with the image being scaled.

Plan B: Hook my PC to the PC input

I still have to order this cable, but now I'm going to try hooking from my video card's secondary output, through a DVI(analong) to VGA converter and into the 15-pin VGA port on the back of the Samsung. You cannot use a normal KVM cable (15-pin male to 15-pin female) to do this, both ends of the VGA cable must be male.

At that point, I'll have to mess around with video timings and try to get the 1360x768 resolution working.

Labels: 2005, Monitors

posted by Wuphon's at 7:56 PM