What good is a big-screen TV if you can’t watch sports on it? This was the dilemma we faced in our household this weekend when March Madness suddenly ran up against a promised showing of Snow White for our four-year-old. Picture-in-picture was an option, but not an appealing one. Until I learned that our Samsung LN46A530 provides an option for split screen viewing. Ha! The audio track is a bit disconcerting, but the basketball display is still bigger than the TV screens I watched as a kid… if a little vertically stretched.
What’s feeding the TV? Is it analog cable or OTA? Or a cable box for one half, and OTA for the other? Trying to figure out how this is done… hm.
Our 32″ Sony XBR6 does something like this. Both windows are still in the correct aspect ratio, so they don’t fill the entire screen and one is larger than the other. The left, larger window is any input and the right, smaller window must be OTA/Clear QAM using the built-in tuner.
I don’t know if any TVs still have this nifty “picture and picture” feature?
BTW there’s a PIP button on our FiOS remote control but in three years it has yet to function.
Dave- we just had a long discussion about the video source, and I’ve come to the conclusion that in addition to the DVD source, we were getting OTA digital signal. The basketball feed was not coming from the cable box, which means we couldn’t run this set-up with non-broadcast channels.
Oddly, we used to get a combination of analog cable channels and digital OTA signals without the cable set-top, but now that Comcast has switched off analog here, that’s now longer the case.
Joel- the TV is fairly new, so presumably there are others with this feature?
Mari has Comcast, so my guess is CBS 3 is ClearQAM… But that’s only a guess!
I have a Samsung plasma (only 42″) and it does PIP but not side by side “pop”.
Ooh she beat me too it! Darn iPhone lag!
Our XBR6 is two years old. I’m not sure if the newer Sonys have this anymore. Maybe it’s just Samsung?
I’m looking for a small 1080p HDTV/PC monitor for the office that’s attached to our bedroom. I’d love a PIP or POP feature on a 23″ or 26″ but haven’t been able to find it yet. Our seven year old 15″ Samsung SD LCD has PIP (for analog only, so it’s worthless now) but it seems most new ones at the smaller sizes don’t have PIP.
Guess we could go 32″ or 40″ for the bedroom, except cost and room are slight issues. :-)
I’ve been wondering for a long time if TVs had this feature, is it common?