T.R. REID and BRIT HUME
In the world of business presentations, there’s a marked gap between software and hardware capabilities. That is, the major software programs that help you create graphic presentations have awesome power; but the hardware available to show off these creations is inadequate.
Let’s say you’re the regional vice president of “Amalgamated Widgets,” and you are picked to make a crucial 15-minute pitch to the board about your division’s new sales technique. You load up one of the major presentation graphics programs Corel, Lotus, or Microsoft and put together a lecture that will knock the director’s socks off.
Before these programs came along, business presentations were pretty cut and dried. You printed up a few charts and graphs, created some posters with key buzzwords on them, propped up everything on a wobbly stand, and started talking.
Today, presentations take place on a computer screen, and they can be stunning. It’s not just the bright colors, the striking graphics, or the way you can drop in spreadsheets or database tables. Nowadays, the software makes it easy to spice up the talk with music, movie clips, live television, or online data pulled down in real time from the Internet.
The problem is that all your work tends to be drained of its punch when the presentation is displayed.
Most systems available for projecting computer displays to a large screen are bland, washed out and blurry. You proudly project the new corporate logo that you paid a designer $10,000 to produce; the chairman peers from his seat in the corner of the room and says,
“What’s that blue blotch at the top of the screen?”
The fact that these projection systems tend to be heavy, cumbersome, and fragile when you have to travel with them just adds insult to injury.
But we recently came upon a new approach to this problem. The “TView Gold Card” from Focus Enhancements (www.focusinfo.com) is a six-ounce, credit-card-sized unit that produces beautiful displays from any laptop computer.
This device is a computer-to-TV converter. It takes the output from your laptop and sends it, through a standard cable TV cable, to a TV set. The fairly simple software lets you choose whether the display should come out in NTSC format (that’s the standard TV display in the U.S. and much of Asia) or PAL (the standard in Europe), or the emerging standard, SCART. This means you can hook up to just about any TV in the world without compatibility problems.
We were delighted at how well this $300 product does its job. You slip the Gold Card into the card slot of a laptop, connect the cable to the “video input” plug on the back of the TV and that’s it. Now your computer display appears on the TV screen. The image is sharp, and the colors are bright.
What this means for the traveling business person is that you can take your high-powered Lotus presentation to the customer’s site with no need to lug along a projector, screen, etc. As long as the customer has a TV set, you’re in business. It takes less than a minute to connect the cable (the card draws its power from the computer, so you don’t have to plug in an adapter), and the results are excellent, even in a room with lots of ambient light.
The software also lets you send your PC’s output directly to a videotape recorder. That means you can tape your presentation and send it out as a sales or training video.
When you’re not making presentations, the device has other uses. For PC users of a certain age those of us who can’t understand why the words on the screen are so much harder to see than they were five years ago this card lets you see again. You pump all your computer work from the laptop screen to a large-screen TV, and suddenly those gray squiggles on the screen turn out to be numbers on a spreadsheet.
The Gold Card can also enhance PC games. Now you can project the game on a big color TV rather than the mousy little laptop screen. Not that we would waste any time on such frivolity. The fact that we have The Links LS 99 golf game showing on a 31-inch TV screen as we write this is simply because we felt a need to test the Gold Card for this column. (And if you believe that, maybe you’ll also believe that we just got a hole-in-one on the 10th at St. Andrews.)
T.R. Reid is London bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected] and Brit Hume at [email protected].
