I have an project that's similar to a typical trade show booth setup. I'll have a laptop for playing content and a large LCD monitor connected to the laptop for displaying it. As you would expect, the resolution of the laptop's internal panel is different than the large external LCD. It may even be a different aspect ratio depending on the specific laptop that ends up being allocated.

The content to be displayed is raster graphics (image files) and can be created at the native resolution of the large external LCD panel. How do I get this content to display full screen at the native resolution of the large external LCD? My guess is...

1) Extend desktop across internal & external LCD's (i.e. 2 monitor mode)

2) Drag player application window to external LCD

3) Run "player" application in full screen mode

 

hmm... I played around a little with this kind of setup... depending on your video card setup, you MAY be able to set separate resolutions for the laptop display and the external LCD. If you can't, I think the best option would be to run it in external LCD mode ONLY - the laptop display will be off. This will let you set the resolution to whatever the external LCD allows.

Hope that helped in some way,
srika

 

Powerstrip! http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm

I friend of mine just reminded me of it. I had completely forgot it existed. The only thing is, I believe that you still need a a graphics driver that has the capability of defining custom resolutions and scan rates. I believe only nVidia and ATI currently have that. I'm going to have to check to see if any of our laptops have the mobile video GPU's from either of these guys.

 

holy options, batman.

options = good

 

Almost any laptop made in the last few years should be able to do this with ease. I have a pair of plasmas I rent out, and many times they are used at trade shows and I will setup the client's computer/video source in addition to the plasma. I've never had any problems other than they didn't make the presentation in the format of the plasma.

If you don't care about seeing the presentation on the laptop, Srika's method would be the best. It lets the entire GPU become dedicated to running only the external display. Depending on the level of graphics in the presentation, this might not be needed but it can't hurt! Just change the output of the laptop to the external monitor, and change the resolution to whatever the native of your presentation is (I hope it's the same as the native of the display).

If you DO want to see it on the laptop as well, you need to use a clone function. Almost every laptop has it, just some don't present it as an option but rather require you to use the Funtion button + another key. On my Dell, Fn+F8 toggles between Internal Screen, External Screen, Video Out, and Clone between two of the three. Just set the resolution to the native of the presentation again. It may look funny on the laptop, but you can still monitor whats going on if the external display isn't facing you.

The third option is to do as you wrote above, which allows you to do other work on the laptop while running the presentation. You should be able to set the resolution on the external display to anything you want. Some cards don't let you pass the primary monitor's resolution.

 

You answered your own question billiam.

I do what your asking often to play movies from my Gaming Rig on my HDTV.
Main Monitor (Dell LCD) runs at 1600x1200@60Hz and the TV is setup as a Secondary Monitor to the right of the LCD using standard XP Display Properties window. TV is setup to run at 1080i which is something x 1080 @ 30Hz.

I open Windows Media player, drag it over to the other screen and then go full screen.

 

I messed around with this some last night using a laptop that has an ATI mobile Radeon for its video. My plan seems like it should work fine. The problem I'm having is that Windows plug & play keeps detecting my large external monitor as a "standard television" and not an LCD monitor. This is limiting the resolution to 640 x 480.

The monitor is a Sony FWD-32LX1 (32" LCD) which has a native resolution of 1366 x 768 (WXGA). There were no CD's in the box with it and I was all over Sony's web site. Sony does not appear to have a monitor inf file for this thing. WTF Sony?

BTW - Everything works fine if I clone the output to the laptop's LCD and the external VGA port. However, this limits the external display to 1024 x 768. I want to be able to utilize the full native resolution of the external Sony panel.

 

I'm trying to make sense of the user manual... look at the chart on page 23 and the info about adjusting pixels on page 30 - however the latter only applies if you are using analog. Looking at that chart, I think it may be possible that even if you could get 1366x768 out of your laptop, you couldn't display that on the monitor... I mean it doesn't list 1366x768 as one of the possible computer input resolutions. This would also explain why it's at 1024x768 - which would be the second highest resolution for a WXGA monitor.

http://www.hdtvsolutions.com/pdf/son...xxLX1_User.pdf

I checked their download site, yeah they pretty much have nothing for this monitor.

 

1280x768 may be what you get stuck with, that's a standard widescreen resolution.

On the clone function, you may have to switch the LCD to the primary monitor if you want to up the resolution (perhaps the laptop has a cheapie screen that is only 1024x768?).