[jji666]

Greetings. I've been playing around with giving my man-cave more of a sports bar feel by having some subsidiary displays located around the room that will show whatever is on the main screen in front, but smaller scale. For example, one display by the bar/beer fridge, one on the other side of the room, etc., so that when people are over, even if they're not sitting and focused on the main screen, they can keep an eye on what on the main screen.


Presently I've been using some extra SXGA LCD monitors I had lying around for the subsidiary displays. The problem is that these monitors either go to 1020 or 1050 but not 1080p. Thus I can watch 720p content out of my satellite box but not 1080p content out of my HTPC (blu-ray movies, for example).


I was wondering if anyone has a cheap solution - a few hundred bucks plus my existing spare hardware - to scale a 1080p signal (HDMI/DVI) down to something that these monitors can display?


The Gefen scaler mate looks promising -- I could not tell confidently from the documentation whether it would accept a 1080p input and output a 720p signal. I also considered building a computer that I could use to scale video down, since I'm looking for a home for my Blackmagic intensity pro card anyway, but I don't think its HDMI input accepts 1080p at all.


Anyone have any other suggestions in the sub-$400 range?


Thanks!

 

[Fudoh]

Why don't you simply set your source to 720p instead of 1080p ?

 

[jji666]

Because that would require me to reduce the resolution on the main screen, which is a 47" 1080p LCD, and when I watch 1080p movies I want them to be 1080p on the main screen. The downscaling is for other displays that don't handle 1080p.


Thanks.

 

[jji666]

I bought a Gefen HJ Mate Scaler as the best solution. Hope it's decent quality. The specs say it will accept a 1080p signal which means it should be able to send the signal to any digital display.