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Why an HD video card if no HD/Blu-Ray Drive?
- Thread starter CBAviator
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My guess is so that HD videos / movies downloaded from Apple will look good on your new iMac!
Oh from iTunes or something? (sorry, I'm new to the Apple community! My iMac arrives on Monday!!)
I honestly think that Apple will silently update the iMac, MacBook Pro and Mac Pro with a BTO Blu-ray and/or HD DVD drive option after Leopard ships. The costs are coming down on the drives and Leopard is the perfect time to add the playback support at the software level. It makes it even easier if they have hardware already out that has the capability (at the graphics level at least).
There are a lot of people who use the xBox 360 HD DVD add-on with their PC's. If Leopard adds the software support you could probably just use one of those...
There are a lot of people who use the xBox 360 HD DVD add-on with their PC's. If Leopard adds the software support you could probably just use one of those...
I just recently bought the HD DVD drive for the 360- I am hoping that the external drive would work on the imac... my 360 died last week so my HD DVD drive is worthless until I get the 360 back... The player makes the movies look really good in HD...
I hope Apple releases an external Bluray drive for us new imac owners...
OK, so then here's a question. Assuming Apple would release an internal BTO option for the iMac, would us "already iMac owners" be able to take our computers to an Apple store and have the internal drives swapped for the new HD drive?
WTF? It is not an "HD" card its just a marketing gimmick for something videocards have been able to do for years.
Expel the High-Definition term out of your brain and replace it with the term resolution. Remember good ol' resolution? Yeah so much for the HD craze.
HD Buzz - A Television thing ...
The whole deal with HD is really just a TV thing. I don't want to get to technical, but, Non-HD TV's have lower screen resolution that dates back to the 1940's. New technology allows TV stations to broadcast an improved signal that is much higher resolution. This higher resolution is called HDTV. Computer screen resolution has been much higher than TV for some time now (many years).
My earlier post was meant to be "tongue in cheek". Certainly, if you download (buy) a movie from the Apple iTunes store, it will be much higher resolution than what a non-HD TV can display, which is why Apple suggests yourTV be connected to a HDTV. So, any movie downloaded or run from CD will have HDTV Video quality when played on your iMac. Hence, why not call the video card "HD". This is what Apple promotes. It's all part of their "Digital Lifestyle" strategy and marketing campaign.
It's all good!
The whole deal with HD is really just a TV thing. I don't want to get to technical, but, Non-HD TV's have lower screen resolution that dates back to the 1940's. New technology allows TV stations to broadcast an improved signal that is much higher resolution. This higher resolution is called HDTV. Computer screen resolution has been much higher than TV for some time now (many years).
My earlier post was meant to be "tongue in cheek". Certainly, if you download (buy) a movie from the Apple iTunes store, it will be much higher resolution than what a non-HD TV can display, which is why Apple suggests your
TV be connected to a HDTV. So, any movie downloaded or run from CD will have HDTV Video quality when played on your iMac. Hence, why not call the video card "HD". This is what Apple promotes. It's all part of their "Digital Lifestyle" strategy and marketing campaign. It's all good!
You could connect one of these to it I suppose to watch Blu-Ray movies and burn discs:
http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=10867
Take it to the Apple store and swap? Maybe.
Most likely though, I would assume a third party company would make a cheaper external or internal drive that would work just as good.
At least, I hope. I'm getting spoiled by my Toshiba HD DVD player and PS3. I hardly watch Standard Def DVD anymore.
Actually the SDTV standard, or NTSC standard (here in the US at least) was developed in 1953. The system contains only about 488 lines of resolution. It's interlaced and shown at 60Hz.
Before this standard there were many different resolutions and rates of broadcast. The French even developed a 960 line system in the mid '40's. Some American TV's had as little as 200 lines of resolution before the 1953 NTSC standard.
My earlier post was meant to be "tongue in cheek". Certainly, if you download (buy) a movie from the Apple iTunes store, it will be much higher resolution than what a non-HD TV can display, which is why Apple suggests your
Not true. The resolution of the iTunes content is not higher than SDTV. It is actually just a little lower, that is why Apple says "near-DVD" quality. iTunes store material has a maximum resolution of 640X480 - SDTV is around 720X480. Apple suggests that you hook an
TV to an HDTV because it is natively widescreen. The requirement for the TV is a 16X9 ratio - not HDTV. You can gladly hook the device up to an EDTV, essentially a Plasma or LCD with a 16:9 aspect ratio and slightly more resolution.BUT, there is one very important feature of this graphics card (that, in my opinion, grants it the right to be called HD): it supports HDCP. (Wikipedia article In a nutshell, because this graphics card supports HDCP, you can play HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies at full resolution.
P.S. I hope there will be an offering for us early adopters to upgrade our internal drives to Blu-ray. If not, I'll just have to get an external case that uses FW800 (OWC makes some great external cases, BTW). I really want to watch full HD movies on my full HD iMac.
Mmm... 1920x1200... (1080p is 1920x1080)
you'll find that a 720 x 480 video is quite identical to a 640 x 480 image in terms of quality simply due to the fact that 720 x 480 is simply the non square pixel version of 640 x 480.
NTSC video displayed at 720 x 480 with out being resized down to 640 x 480 pixels will appear noticeably distorted.
BUT, there is one very important feature of this graphics card (that, in my opinion, grants it the right to be called HD): it supports HDCP. (Wikipedia article In a nutshell, because this graphics card supports HDCP, you can play HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies at full resolution.
P.S. I hope there will be an offering for us early adopters to upgrade our internal drives to Blu-ray. If not, I'll just have to get an external case that uses FW800 (OWC makes some great external cases, BTW). I really want to watch full HD movies on my full HD iMac.
Many other cards have HDCP capabilites and forsake the HD monicker.