Mac and Samsung

I missed out on describing my experience with my new TV due to the problems with my blog.  I may as well bullet point some of them rather than splurge it all out because I’ve already forgotten a lot of the obsessive messing I made on receipt of it.

Ought to point out that this photo of the setup has been taken twice at different exposures and photoshopped together in order to capture both the room ambient light and that emanating from the screens.

So here’s the quick fire round…

Connected the TV to my mac via DVI on the mac side and hdmi on the TV side.  To do this I had to purchase an apple mini-dvi to dvi adapter and I used a nicely priced extreme-hd dvi-hdmi cable.  Playing video, the quality is great in terms of colours and contrast, they’re spot on, although I did have to re calibrate the colours because the mac’s “samsung” profile (where did it get that from?) tended towards a bright high contrast / high gamma image which wasn’t well suited to video.  In the photo I have a rather naughty 720p x264 of casino royale, I downloaded to check out how it looked on this screen, and it looks stunning!

I’m not using the mac to tv setup for actual desktop apps, but if you were you may be a little disappointed, photo’s look good, but text looks a little off because various factors.  Firstly for some reason this TV’s actual resolution is 1366×768, not 720p, even more bizarre the hdmi/dvi input provides the mac with a list of resolutions which doesn’t include the actual native resolution.  You’re pretty much stuck with 1280×720.  Some people have gotten closer with such apps as displayconfigx but I haven’t had any luck.  What would tend to happen when a non native res is used on a screen is a slight blur, but this TV to avoid this uses a heck of a lot of sharpening, which is great for video but not so much for desktop apps, and is the reason I think that text looks a little odd.  It’s a culmination of the mac’s text smoothing filter and then being sharpened.

Another problem is that not only is the res outputted at a non native res but it doesn’t even fill the screen.  You have to turn on overscan, which then goes to the other extreme and misses some screen off.  Again it’s fine for video, you only lose about 25-30 pixels each side and filming is usually done with some screen loss in mind anyway.  But if you make the screen the primary one, so that the mac menu bar is on the TV you won’t see it and will have to blindly move the pointer left and right off the top of the screen to find the menu you want… or have borders.

I’ve also been revisted by some issues I used to have during the time I would use my iBook on a monitor.  OS X is lacking some obvious features, and seems to be lacking them at such a low level that no one has come up with a utility to fix the flaws.  It basically boils down to not being able to manually turn displays on and off.  The iMac’s built in monitor cannot be turned off and even at the lowest brightness there is still enough light eminating from it to be distracting if you are only using the mac to serve some video to the TV.

On the other side, you cannot turn the outputting to the TV off, unless you physically pull the cable out the back.  Even if the TV is turned off, the mere fact that something is plugged into the mini-dvi socket is enough for the mac to always be driving a second display.  That is the mouse can fly off the right hand side of the screen, and I’m sure… a ton of the video cards resources are being eaten up.

What annoys me is that this topic has been brought up time and time again on the apple.com discussion forum and Apple have taken no notice.  Perversly if I was to reboot into windows on this exact same machine I would have no trouble at all turning displays on and off as I please.

Hmm, written more than I intended here, think I’ll talk about other things TV in a future episode.