Thinkpads Forum

My T60 and I arrived safely in Paris, and now I'm trying to figure out if I can hook the laptop up to a TV I have here. The TV is a new-looking Phillips LCD HDTV. It has 2 HDMI inputs, an open French 21 pin SCART video connector (the other one is plugged into a LiveBox), and a set of component inputs labelled Y/Pb/Pr.

I believe my options are VGA -> component, DVI -> HDMI, or VGA -> SCART. But I don't know enough about how video works to know what that really entails. I don't have a port replicator with me, so I don't even really have DVI output right now. Do I have any hope for doing this without spending hundreds of dollars?

(Mild grumble; the Apple Powerbook I had a year ago had no trouble with tihs kind of thing. Would be nice for Thinkpads to catch up.)

I am no expert, but I am sure that you could get a mini doc and use the DVI connector and a HMDI adapter. It would likely be the best picture.

If you don't use a dock, the only output from the T60p would be analog.

That being said, I has a 21" LCD running for a while off the VGA port at 1600x1050 resolution and it looked pretty good.

I have a shiny new Philips HDTV and yes - you can either use an analog cable - VGA to 5 X BNC, with phono adaptors, + a 1/8" minijack to minijack cable for sound. OR get an Advanced Minidock and a DVI to HDMI cable. The latter is great, the T60 (at least the p model I have) is fine at generation 1080i HDTV, but there's no sound as HDMI requires only carries digital sound, and it's not present on the T60.

Now if only Presentation Director contained the HDTV resolution options, then I wouldn't have to manually mess about in the various control panels to make the Philips my primary display and get it to the correct resolution etc.

I don't know whether it is readily available in France, but this might do the trick:
http://aver.com/ppd/quickplay_spec.html
They have other products that support higher resolutions. I have an older version of one of hose other ones and it was actually not bad for VGA to S-Video. Now that I have a T60 I may have to dust it off and start using it again...
(Edited to add this: Most VGA to S-Video will do PAL and NTSC but not the French SECAM. However, many newer digital TVs are actually multistandard. Check the specs on your TV/monitor.
Since you're in Paris, a trip to the FNAC might be useful).