[RGray02]

I was going to buy a sharp LCD tv, but I'm thinking it may be a nifty idea to ditch my 15 inch powerbook and get the new iMac 20. I dont have oodles of space, and this is right up my alley.

How can you get video input to the LCD on the new iMac? A tuner? Does someone sell a reasonably priced firewire input that can do progressive scan?

[nelliott]

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

The Elgato Eye TV is what you'll need. They produce a range of firewire tv tuners (forget the USB product as this uses MPEG1 compression). If you're lucky enough to live in the USA the eyetv 500 is HDTV ready, or for us lowly Europeans the 300 and 400 models support DVB (Digital TV).

The new iMac looks like it could make a perfect Home Theatre PC .

[si_lance]

you guys should not have shown me this... it's just another excuse for me to buy an iMac and not wait...

[dennett]

I've been planning on buying a LCD TV for my motorhome, so I was thinking about using this new iMac for that purpose as well. Does anyone know anything about the VESA mounts?

[Commodus]

The VESA mounting kit for the iMac will be available in October - though I don't exactly know why you couldn't just use the Cinema Display kit, since presumably it has to keep the same kind of distance from the mounting arm or wall (for the power cable's sake).

In any case, the only obstacle I'd see to using an iMac as an LCD TV is that you can only get an HDTV signal into it if you live in the US. Here in Canada there's no such thing as over-the-air HDTV, and to no one's surprise the boxes you get for HDTV here aren't necessarily going to give you an HD signal that you can use.

[intake]

Originally posted by Commodus:
[B]The VESA mounting kit for the iMac will be available in October - though I don't exactly know why you couldn't just use the Cinema Display kit, since presumably it has to keep the same kind of distance from the mounting arm or wall (for the power cable's sake).

VESA is a standard, so any VESA mount should work. A few problems you would want to consider first.

1) You would want to make sure that it can support the weight of the unit.
2) You wound probably want to get a mounts that swivels to point the iMac at your sitting position. You would want to make sure that it can be locked down when you are underway
3) You would want to make sure that any mount you are using (especially a fixed flat mount) has enough clearance behind it for and cables you will plug into it, like the power cord.

Other than that, I would be a neat idea to have in an R/V. If you could wire the ElGato or other TV tuner in a nearby compartment, you would be set.

The biggest problem I can see is that you would probably need a hefty power inverter to power the iMac when you were not plugged into shore power or running a generator. For this reason alone, a PowerBook might still be a better choice. If you did get an LCD TV or monitor (like the Dell W1700 TV), you could always plug the laptop in by DVI and use the larger screen if you want.