Movies grainy with new Mac Pro and 30"

Question

I'm running a Mac Pro 2 x 3.0 GHz Quad with an OEM NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics card and DVDs are grainy and lacking in color. The DVDs only look good if I reduce the window down to around 5 inches or so. Full screen is awful. The monitor is supposed to be a bit better than Apple's 30", I'm running a HP LP3065 - 30" I expected to be totally WOWed. Not even close...
Is it the monitor? The card? The Mac Pro?
Thanks,
Steven

Answer 1

Steven Shmerler wrote:
The graphics cards that you can get at the Apple Store for the 30" boast they can run 2 - 30" screens. What on earth for? What is 2650 x 1600 good for?
Steven,
Generally the higher resolutions are so you can get 'more' on a screen, but not necessarily 'bigger'. I'll use some poor examples (to keep the math simple for my old brain cells). Let's say I had a collection of photos, each 400 pixels wide and 300 pixels deep. If I had a 21" monitor (and let's assume the 20" is the width rather than the diagonal which is what the measurement actually relates to) with a height of 15" and it displayed at a resolution of 1200 x 900 pixels, I would get on that monitor 3 rows wide and 3 rows deep of photos (i.e. 400x300 three times). Physically, each picture would measure 7" wide and 5" deep.
Now let's take a second monitor with a resolution of 2,800 pixels wide and 2,100 pixels high. On the monitor I can now display seven photos across and seven photos down. To keep the pictures the same actual size as they were on the previous monitor, this new one would have to be 49" across and 42" deep.
If I displayed the original three by three grid on this new monitor it would have to enlarge each photo beyond its actual pixels and the quality would suffer accordingly.
People use larger monitors so they can see more of a document, an image, a video clip, whatever within one screen, but almost always what they look at is smaller than it would be on a lower resolution screen, although they see more without scrolling.
A 30" display will never display movies full size at the quality you are expecting.
TVs use different technology, but the principles still hold true. What BestBuy will be doing is making sure that what they display is high definition, whether this be cable TV channels or DVDs to show the best quality picture they can. This doubles the resolution of standard def. TV which looks mediocre on large TVs.
If watching movies is your prime need then you may well be better off with a smaller monitor with lower resolution.
David