[Darkl0rd1]

After having the VGA upgrade card installed in my Loewe Aconda for a week, I’ve discovered some very interesting aspects to the card including support for progressive resolutions I didn’t expect to find.

As I’m sure many of you know, you can get Loewe TVs with the Q2500 chassis to sync to 480p@60hz and 720x576p@60hz both of which look very good, but being 4x3 resolutions will be stretched to fill the 16x9 display (there is no way to compensate for this using the TVs VGA geometry settings). Some people have had success with the widescreen 848x480p@60hz resolution, which is great for NTSC DVDs and for general PC usage (as the geometry is restored to a proper ratio), but is useless for PAL given the difference in screen resolution and refresh rate.

The interesting thing is did you know that you can get Loewe Q2500 TVs to sync to 1024x576p@50hz? This resolution is simply stunning for PAL DVDs. It really has to be seen to be believed. The quality difference with DVDs over the standard Loewe digital processing and when compared to other TVs displaying a progressive PAL picture is simply stunning.

I have written up a thorough analysis of the VGA card which you can find here.

I would be very interested in any thoughts or discussion concerning this topic.

[groundy]

Great in-depth review and you've obviously put a lot of time and effort in to this .

[Fe+]

very interesting, have been toying with the idea / wondering what sort of picture / quality I could get from my pc upto my tv...

[leeoh]

Darklord, what DVD player did you use and what did you use to feed the signal to the VGA card ?

I tried clicking on the link you posted but got the can't display page/broken link message.

Thanks mate

[Fe+]

http://www.htcentral.net/Darklord/mytheatre.htm

[Nic Rhodes]

Great stuff, well done.

How does the Loewe cope with crushing whites in this input, is it okay?

[Darkl0rd1]

Originally posted by groundy
Great in-depth review and you've obviously put a lot of time and effort in to this .

Thanks mate. You could say that I was sitting in front of my PC and TV tweaking for just a few hours . I was determined to find every decent resolution the TV could sync to. I'm sure there are a couple of other interesting ones lurking beneath the surface, but as far as DVDs via HTPC goes 848x480 and 1024x576 look the best by far.

Originally posted by leeoh
Darklord, what DVD player did you use and what did you use to feed the signal to the VGA card ?

I didn’t use a standalone player, and if you are thinking about using one yourself with a Loewe TV via VGA input, then my advice is fergeddabout it! If you read my review (link is definitely working now) you'll see that Loewe TVs are extremly fussy about being fed the right combination of resolution, horizontal scan rate, refresh rate and geometry settings. You really do have to tweak quite heavily with PowerStrip to get things perfect (but it is possible). There is no way you could do this with a standalone player. You would either get no picture at all, or one that is far from centered, which you couldn't correct with Loewe's shoddy geometry controls.

Originally posted by leeoh
I tried clicking on the link you posted but got the can't display page/broken link message

Try this one --> http://www.htcentral.net/community/viewtopic.php?t=500

Originally posted by Fe+
http://www.htcentral.net/Darklord/mytheatre.htm

That's my main HT. You won’t find any reference to the VGA card there. Although if you're interested in the other equipment involved in the test you might want a look

Originally posted by The Beekeeper
How does the Loewe cope with crushing whites in this input, is it okay?

Good question Beekeeper, and I am please to report there is no loss in white detail whatsoever! Bright or muddy whites now display every last fine detail It’s actually an area I forgot to cover in my review, but did so some basic tests today to test just that as I have certainly noticed loss of white detail when using component or S-Video input via my Toshiba player. It would seem that because using the VGA input you are bypassing all the digital processing circuitry altogether, that whatever was crushing white detail in the Loewe processing is now out of the loop.