Help picking a video card and other related gear

[Dieter]

> > And of course dead pixel warranties.
> 
> I understand production yields... and supply/demand for top binned
> parts... and $1200. If they're present and annoying, it's going
> back. I'll live with any that grow post warranty.

The dead pixel policies of various companies (may have changed by now):
http://www.behardware.com/articles/666-1/a-look-into-dead-pixels-2007.html

> > Given your interest in color calibration, I assume you want MVA,
> > PVA, or IPS with 8 bits/color, rather than TN with only 6 bits/color.
> 
> That would be the 24bit/pixel in the DVI-D spec.

Yes, they accept 24 bits/pixel (8x3) from the interface, but the TN
panels actually only do 18 bits (6x3) and dither to fake the rest.

"Some types of LCD displays have a more limited color resolution than
advertised, and must use spatial and/or temporal dithering to increase
the apparent color depth. This can cause a shimmering effect with some
types of displays which can be distracting for some users."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCD

I haven't heard of any TN panels in 30" yet.

> > OTA ATSC in the US is mpeg2 transport stream 480i, 720p and 1080i.
> > Max bitrate is 19.3 Mbps.
> 
> Cool, so I only need 16.5TB/year to store one M-F show in raw TS ;)

I get 8.685 MB/hour * 5 * 52 = 2.26 TB/year worst case for a 60 minute
show that actually has 260 unique episodes/year (news?).  Plus whatever
safety margin you like for clock skew (even if your clock is perfect the
station may be off, sometimes on purpose).

Looking at some actual files, where only the useful PIDs are saved,
worst case is 7.87 GB/60 min.  That's for a station with one subchannel.
PID filtering cuts the disk space required way down if the station has
multiple subchannels.  Some tuners can filter PIDs, (the cx88 driver
doesn't) or you can do it after the fact with a utility.

If you plan to record and archive a lot, plan for lots of disks.  :-(