Want to get Internet video to your TV? There are lots of options, but here’s a pretty elegant one: new laptops that can send whatever is on their screens wirelessly to the TV.
The technology is called Intel Wireless Display, and it’s showing up in laptops from Dell Inc., Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. It works well, though I don’t think it’s the be-all and end-all that will bridge the world of PCs and TVs. The biggest hurdle for Wireless Display is that you need a new laptop to use it.
The laptops are relatively big, heavy models, ranging in price from $900 for the Toshiba E205 I tried to $1,050 for the Sony Vaio S. As sold by Best Buy, they come with a Netgear Push2TV wireless adapter, which is a small box the size of two card decks. You place it in your entertainment center and connect it to the TV, preferably with a digital HDMI cable, or to a digital receiver that’s already connected to the TV.
You fire up Intel’s software on the PC. It senses the presence of the Push2TV receiver and lets you connect to it. Whatever’s on the laptop’s screen is now duplicated on the TV.
In early versions of the product, it was difficult to utilize the full screen area of a “1080p” HDTV, but Intel has fixed that. You still need to make a quick manual adjustment to make the PC’s signal fill out the screen.
The resolution projected by the PC is equivalent to 720p, the lower of the two HDTV resolutions. Blown up on a big TV with 1080p resolution, it can look a little blurry. But for the most common purposes, like watching videos on YouTube, Hulu or Netflix, it works well enough. The wireless signal carries audio as well, which you can…