Meantime Sharp Electronics Corp says it has begun sampling a device called a PC-TV tuner designed to enable personal computers to receive and display broadcast or cable television signals, or signals from recorders and laser disks, and it can go into notebook computers with active matrix displays such as the IBM Corp ThinkPads. The product is offered OEM (no prices given) and for demonstration purposes, Sharp has packaged it up for the ThinkPad, where it drops into the floppy drive bay under the keyboard. It sees it being used in plug-in boards, PCMCIA cards and bay-type plug-in units. In the demonstration, the tuner accepts demodulated NTSC video signals, converts them to RGB for display on the colour display. Audio signals are sent to the ThinkPad’s built-in amplifier and speaker. Sharp is sampling the front-end unit, a compact flat-mount tuner, IF amplifier and phase-locked loop; designers have to add the control logic, analogue-to-digital converter and video processing circuitry; volume in January; the PAL version samples in January.
