Pixelworks improves displays behind the scenes

I RAN INTO A REPRESENTATIVE from Pixelworks in the elevator of the Grand Hyatt hotel, private suite central at Computex. He dragged me into its suite, and showed me its wares, a range of chips you will never directly buy.

Pixelworks makes, for lack of a better term, chips that make video look better. Take a look at this board below. It is the Venus reference board for the PWM2000 chip. Of it, Pixelworks makes, I think, only the topmost of the triad of big chips in the center. The PWM2000 is basically an MPEG2 decoder and a few other video features, but it looks good.

There was another chip on display, the PW3300. This chip is made for video stability, and the display sure seemed to work well. The demo TV had a grainy, bad picture with a fuzzy rolling image, and all the things that make TV not worth watching, other than the content.

The PW3300 board on the other hand had a less grainy, less awful, non-rolling madly, image. I would not call it good by any means, but it was watchable, something the other image was not.

The last demo was what Pixelworks can do for LCD and plasma TVs. It had a high end Sony screen and a much cheaper no name panel with the Pixelworks chip powering it. The Sony screen had some noticeable aliasing, jaggies, and little things that you would notice if you sat close enough to the TV to get radiation burns.

The Pixelworks powered screen had a lot less of these annoying things, reduced for an overall better picture.

There will never be a 'Powered by Pixelworks' sticker on your next TV, no boot up logo, no nothing. It is simply a neat technology that I happened to stumble onto in the wild and wacky world of Computex. µ