Colby and I spent an hour or so with a Fujitsu 5002 yesterday, trying to understand how it works with DVI. The main issue was to discover how to deal with the 1366 horizontal resolution, given that most video cards can only produce 1360 or 1368. Would the Fujitsu scale (bad) or crop (good)?
Before I dive into the details, I must mention what a visually striking plasma the 5002 is. The silver frame really looks great and I can imagine it in my living room already. I briefly watched 5th Element on a non-progressive Denon player and it looked good. Black levels were good (with the lights down) and although the picture needed some tweaking I can see the potential for this to be an awesome plasma.
That said, we didn't have a huge amount of success using DVI from my custom built HTPC. The test system was:
PIII 1.2ghz/ASUS TUSL2
Visiontek Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 32mb with DVI-D
Win98SE
PowerStrip 3.02 build 201
DVI-D and analog VGA cables
Fujitsu 5002
Firstly, thru the analog VGA connection we could dial up 1368x768 and it looked good but had the flaws you would expect from an analog signal (horizontal moire pattern). In reflection I'm not sure if this was analog distortion or scaling. Colby may wish to comment.
DVI was more challenging. Powerstrip just did not want to play ball. We could get 1024x768 and it looked rock solid, but beyond that point Powerstrip refused to change resolutions for us. It seems that it did not want to let us go any higher than 1024x768 via the DVI. I am unsure if it was a software issue, the plasma or the video card (although the card is rated to do much higher than this via DVI). We tried several display modes including Auto and WXGA. From memory I don't think we could get anything to display when WXGA was selected.
We are going to regroup and try again in a few weeks.
Any suggestions would be welcome. I know a couple of people have tried this!
Thanks to Magnolia Hifi in Bellevue and the local Fujitsu distributor for the chance to try this out. They even got the Fujitsu folks on the phone for us during the test.
Before I dive into the details, I must mention what a visually striking plasma the 5002 is. The silver frame really looks great and I can imagine it in my living room already. I briefly watched 5th Element on a non-progressive Denon player and it looked good. Black levels were good (with the lights down) and although the picture needed some tweaking I can see the potential for this to be an awesome plasma.
That said, we didn't have a huge amount of success using DVI from my custom built HTPC. The test system was:
PIII 1.2ghz/ASUS TUSL2
Visiontek Nvidia Geforce 2 MX 32mb with DVI-D
Win98SE
PowerStrip 3.02 build 201
DVI-D and analog VGA cables
Fujitsu 5002
Firstly, thru the analog VGA connection we could dial up 1368x768 and it looked good but had the flaws you would expect from an analog signal (horizontal moire pattern). In reflection I'm not sure if this was analog distortion or scaling. Colby may wish to comment.
DVI was more challenging. Powerstrip just did not want to play ball. We could get 1024x768 and it looked rock solid, but beyond that point Powerstrip refused to change resolutions for us. It seems that it did not want to let us go any higher than 1024x768 via the DVI. I am unsure if it was a software issue, the plasma or the video card (although the card is rated to do much higher than this via DVI). We tried several display modes including Auto and WXGA. From memory I don't think we could get anything to display when WXGA was selected.
We are going to regroup and try again in a few weeks.
Any suggestions would be welcome. I know a couple of people have tried this!
Thanks to Magnolia Hifi in Bellevue and the local Fujitsu distributor for the chance to try this out. They even got the Fujitsu folks on the phone for us during the test.