Dual monitor and TV out at the same time on laptops
179
points posted to Monitors and Displays, Laptops by theblackcat
02/17/07
Currently dell laptops have at least 3 video outputs. One, naturally, is the built-in screen. The other is a monitor port. The third is a a TV-out. Some brands and docking stations may also have a DVI-D out, but that is secondary here.
The problem is that only two of these outputs can be used a time. It can be any two. For instance you can use an external monitor and a TV and just have the laptop monitor disabled off, even with docking stations. But you can never have, say, a dual-monitor setup and also have your TV-out running as a third monitor. As I understand it this is a limitation of the graphics cards, neither ATI or nVidia make triple-monitor graphics cards. Multiple graphics cards can be used, but this is not possible on a laptop without an expensive upgrade or two.
Now it would be extremely difficult to have three ordinary monitors. It would be extremely taxing on the video card, so I would honestly not expect this to happen. However, TV's use much lower resolution (640 x 480) and much lower frame rates (since they use interlaced frames instead progressive scan like computer monitors). So I could easily see dell offering an optional component that basically acts as a mini graphics card just to run the TV-out. Due to the low graphics requirements this could probably be much smaller, cheaper, require less power, and produce less heat than an ordinary graphics card. The date transfer requirements are low enough that a USB device can handle it, so I see no reason it should be impossible or overly expensive. Really this would only be that useful for video, so it could be limited to only running when a program is playing videos. nVidia graphics cards (and I would assume ATI as well) already support taking over one of the monitors entirely to run a full-screen duplicate of the video on the other screen (but not for 3 monitors).
Either that or just bully nVidia and/or ATI into getting their graphics cards to do this internally. Or switch to another graphics card manufacturer that does support triple monitors.
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