While shopping for a new Sony flat screen TV recently, I found out many now include a VGA port. This allows you to plug your PC directly into the set, treating the PC as its own independent input. I immediately put this on my list of must-have features. Since the new set is installed and ready (surround sound not yet installed fully) I decided it was time to test the VGA port.

Setting it up was a snap. I dug a spare VGA cable out of my Magic Box of supplies, found another cable with a 1/8″ stereo jack on one end and 2 RCA jacks on the other, and carried a spare laptop to the TV room. The VGA cable went from the laptop’s external monitor connector to the TV input, and I connected the laptop’s stereo output jack to an unused audio input on my main amplifier using the 1/8″ adapter cable. The whole process took about a minute. Then I switched the laptop to send output to both its screen and the external monitor adapter, switched the TV to its built-in PC input, and suddenly I was looking at a 46″ Windows logo. Okay, that was a little scary.

My wife & I settled on an episode of House from season 5. These are no longer on Hulu for free, but Amazon has them available for instant download at $1.99 each. A few mouse clicks later, the video started running. I switched the output to “full screen” mode, and we sat back to watch the show.

Technically, the experience was pretty much flawless. The streaming video was smooth as silk, with no stuttering or other distractions. The audio output was pretty good — certainly as clean as anything you’d get from cable or satellite. The only detracting element was the compression of the video stream, which produced somewhat low-resolution imaging that was apparent on the big screen.

The best part was the total absence of commercials. We were able to watch the whole episode in 45 minutes (yes, network TV really offers only that much entertainment per hour) and didn’t have to crowd around a 19″ monitor to do it. I’d call this a successful test.

The next stage will be to outfit a spare desktop PC with a high quality sound card, some big disks, and high end graphics. This affair will be connected permanently to the new TV and audio system, and will act as a video server/storage device.

If you haven’t had the opportunity to try one of the newer TVs in this manner, you don’t know what you’re missing.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.