I read with interest Gordon Laing's column in the October issue on how "High Definition" TVs make poor PC monitors (at least regarding non-square pixels).

Ironically, part of the point of the HDTV standard resolutions is that the pixels are supposed to be square. The problem is that most panels seem not to use the resolutions at which the signal is encoded - 1280x720 or 1920x1080 for HD. I've always assumed that the reason big panels tend to be 1366x768 or 1024x1024 is that they started out life as computer monitors for trade shows, and they
wanted a computer-friendly resolution (at least with the edges cropped off, in the case of 1366x768), so I'm particularly amused to hear you complain about how they're not suited for PC use.

The 1024x1024 variant might just be to make the internal electronics simpler, but in this day and age that's not much of an excuse for the compromised image.

The thing about 1366x768 and 1024x1024 is that they're not very good for HDTV either. Although the former, in particular, has enough resolution to show a 720p image, it'll still smear it out a bit
in the way a desktop TFT does when given a non-native resolution - I'd rather look at a 1024x768 signal on a 1024x768 screen than on a 1280x1024 one.

A 1080 signal can only be displayed by sampling it down, so you'll never get the full picture quality no matter how clever the electronics. 1024x1024 is always going to cause havoc, since it doesn't even have enough resolution to render the lower HDTV resolution horizontally. If I'm going to spend a lot of money on an HDTV, I'm not too keen on having the final stage of the display mess around with the picture - and there aren't many native 1080 panels out there, and there aren't all that many which are truly 1280x720 either.

I can't understand why there's an obsession with making 1366x768 panels when a native 1280x720 panel surely gives a better picture. This doesn't just concern people trying to drive the panel from a PC, it concerns anyone wanting to watch a HDTV picture.

There's still the related problem of actually getting any HD content out of the computer in the first place, with HDCP protection being required for HD playback in Vista (although it's not Microsoft's fault). No current graphics cards support it, and neither do any monitors designed for computer use (yet), even though many can display a 1080p picture with perfect clarity and relative affordability, so long as you don't mind 120 lines of letterboxing.

This won't - probably - stop you from putting a desktop up on your HDTV, but it does mean that if you want to play HD video on your PC you'd better like your TV, because your monitor won't work. For now, this has put me firmly out of the early-adopter bracket which I'd like to occupy until an affordable (not necessarily large) native 1080 panel appears; there's no way I'm paying HDTV prices for a sub-SXGA screen this side of the millennium.

Andrew Garrard