EyeTV: A Fantastic Addition To Any Mac

I’ve been using an Elgato EyeTV tuner for about a year now, and just realized that I should probably share a great product like this with y’all!

Not literally, mind you. I love mine way too much to part with it.

Anyways, the EyeTV is a small, simple USB device. Plug-in your coaxial cable and hook it up to your computer via USB, and you basically turn your computer into a TV. On my monitor, a 24” widescreen Dell, it’s like getting a brand new LCD or plasma TV at a fraction of the cost of a stand-alone set – and without taking up any more space. You can watch TV full-screen, or choose from a variety of sizes. I often have the news running in a small window, tucking it into the corner of my screen while I work.

Even better, it comes with Program Guide software that shows you a list of everything that’s on TV – and you can just click a channel to view. All you have to do is provide it with your cable provider info and zip code, and it does the rest.

You can also record programs, too – just click on the little record button on a show in Program Guide, or manually hit the Record button on the EyeTV “remote.” (Actually, it comes with a REAL remote as well, which works directly with the EyeTV box for changing channels and volume). You can save your recordings to a variety of formats.

And the EyeTV works like a Tivo – you can pause a live show and rewind, perfect for those quick trips to the kitchen.

The EyeTV Program Guide

There are a couple different versions to choose from. I’ve got the 250, which also gives you the ability to plug-in a VCR or camcorder and dupe content. The new EyeTV hybrid looks really, really interesting:

“New! Now with improved reception, FM radio, and TV Guide

EyeTV Hybrid turns your Mac into the world’s most affordable flat-screen HDTV and DVR. EyeTV Hybrid receives both analog and digital TV as well as FM radio, and can also record from a cable or satellite set top box, a video recorder, and a camcorder, using composite or S-Video (analog) connections.”

The only problem I’ve had with mine so far is that if I have it running and plug in my iPhone, it drops the cable TV signal. A simple restart of the EyeTV software is all it takes. I suspect this is probably more of a USB issue than anything else.

The only other problem with it – if you’re a Windows user, that is: this is a Mac-only product.

Choosing monitor formats

A friend from work mentioned he was in the market for a new monitor at home. Seems his trusty old 17" CRT monitor finally bit the dust, and he was ready for a flat panel. "Should I get a regular one? Everything seems to be high-def these days - maybe I should get one of those, instead? But I don't watch movies, so I don't necessarily NEED widescreen."

His question belied some confusion about monitors, mixing-up the nomenclature of modern monitors pretty thoroughly.

First, let's address "high-def" and "widescreen."

High-definition is not necessarily the same as widescreen, although a lot of big widescreen plasma and LCD TVs on the market today are high-def. Hi-def has to do with the number of pixels it packs into the screen area. The more pixels it crams into a given space, the higher the definition.

For a standard home computer, PC or Windows, there's not really a "high definition" option for consumers per se - and if there were, you'd need a high-end video card to take advantage of it. Video professionals may work on truly high-def monitors, but you and I don't.

In the video world, high-def is high compared to, well, standard definition. Fewer rows of horizontal and vertical pixels. My Sony WEGA TV at home is a good old fashioned standard definition tube television. Discovery Channel still looks great, but not as great as it'd look on High Def. But there's not really that dichotomy for your computer.

Now, regardless of whether your TV or monitor is SD or HD, it will probably be one of two aspect ratios: 4:3 or 16:9.



The aspect ratio is the ratio of its longer dimension to its shorter dimension. A "standard," squarish looking tube TV set is a 4:3 aspect ratio - 4 units wide for every three units high.

Widescreen displays, on the other hand, are much wider than they are tall - hence, 16 units of width for 9 units of height. Make sense?

For TVs, whichever you choose depends on what kind of content you view. If you're a movie buff, go for 16x9 - but just make sure you purchase or rent widescreen-format movies. I won't get into all the ins and outs of widescreen, high-def TVs here - that's for Consumer Reports. And besides the original question was about a computer monitor.

So anyways, I find that THIS is the area where people usually need to really think over their monitor needs. Certainly, widescreen format monitors are more popular than ever. If you shop the Dell monitor store online, you'll see that it's frontloaded with widescreens. My criteria for a monitor goes like this: I work in a lot of timeline-based applications, which mean a lot of long horizontal windows. And I'm a multi-tasker as well, needing to view many apps simultaneously. So, I prefer widescreen so that I have less left-to-right scrolling and a wider area to work with.

You, however, may work primarily in 8.5x11 spreadsheets that require a lot of vertical scrolling - so maybe a 4:3 is appropriate. It's closer to the feel of your standard piece of paper when you're working with email, Word docs, or spreadsheets. If you're a "one simple Word file at a time user" and you open up a document on a widescreen display, you'll be looking at lots of empty whitespace all the time.

My feeling is that a lot of businesses probably go with 4:3 displays because they're cheaper, users don't watch movies on them, and they're perfect for simple Office applications, as described above. Or, maybe space is tight and displays must fit into a certain area, ruling out widescreens.

All that said, if you get a large enough widescreen, it will still be as tall as a good 4:3 with the benefit of more width. And, more width also means that you can have multiple documents open on the same screen, at the same time. Which means less toggling back and forth, or minimizing/maximizing to the Start Menu (Windows) or Hiding (Mac). The iMacs come to mind - they're widescreen, but big enough that the proportional "smaller" height is still better than what you'd get with a 19" 4:3 monitor.

Note that all of this applies to laptop displays as well. Many manufacturers are really pushing their widescreen models, but you can still get the standard aspect ratio screens as well.

The screen shot below shows the work area of my primary monitor, a 24" Dell widescreen. Note how I can have a web page and a word processing window fully open, side by side. It gives me 1920x1200 pixels (which technically, is 16:10 not 16:9). I use two widescreens like this, and it's pure computing nirvana!



Now that I look at the non-widescreen offerings on the Dell site, I see that, well, there just aren't many. There are a bunch of 19" and 17" monitors with 1280x724 resolutions (that "squarish" 4:3 look), but nothing bigger. My feeling is that there will always be a few out there, but for the most part they'll be phased out.

So, maybe by the time you're in the market again for a new monitor, the choice between 4:3 and widescreen will have been made much easier for you!

When Blur is Good

If you're the sort to mess around with digital photography from time to time, you've probably experimented with ways to fix problems in your images. Red-eye removal, for example, or maybe a little sharpening to make things a bit crisper. 

Using a blur effect, believe it or not, can also fix problems in photos. There are two main areas where this can work. One would be working with an image file from a scan. If your scan picks up too much texture from the paper upon which the image resides, it can result in a moire effect on details, especially fine lines. It can also have a disturbing effect on skin tones - see the scan of a photo of my mom when she was a little girl. Looks like she had some sort of pox!

Anyway, start with a quarter-pixel basic blur, and see how that does for you. Ratchet it up until the undesirable effect is gone, but before you start to soften the image too much.

Before-and-after, enlarged to show effect.

The other place where blurring REALLY comes in handy is for when you want to include photos in your movies - for example, an iMovie that mixes video with a nice pan/scan effect over digital photos. Photos that contain a lot of thin lines or textures or patterns will often appear to "quiver" or pulsate on the screen, not too badly on the computer but much much worse on a TV set. This has to do with a lot of different factors such as interlacing, but just know for now that to get around it, put a 1 pixel Gaussian blur on your photo before laying it into your timeline, and your problem will be solved!

And don't forget - don't go by what you see on your computer screen alone. It's no substitute for burning a DVD and watching on a standard set when you need to be sure that everything looks as good as it can.