TV Out. I did some testing of the TV out functions today on both the Nokia 5800 and an iPod touch. The iPod uses component (RGB) cables, which offer better quality from the off, the downside being they cost £30 and come bundled with an additional usb charger (normally retailing at £19) for some strange reason. The 5800 comes with the tv out composite cable included, but its a lower quality cable. I test out the same lowish quality mp4 file on both devices. It was a 320x180, 23 frames per second, 695 kbits/second. The file plays great on the built in screens of both devices. But on the big screen it looked terrible. Nether looked good, the nokia was probably the cleaner more jaggy display, the iPod did alot of blurring as it attempted to blow it up to size. I tried a music video from iTMS and that looked very good on the iPod, I didnt have any 640x320 nokia videos, I tested the included batman video, which looked better, but suffered again from being very highly compressed.
One big difference is that with the nokia the screen always mimics the phone, the iPod only plays on the big screen when a movie is playing - so no big screen gaming options. Overall the TV out looked pretty poor on a HD screen, I suspect a CRT would be more forgiving. I used the TV out cable from my N95, not the bundled one (as i left that at work) though i suspect that makes no difference.
Next up i tested iPlayer on both machines.
Here there was a clear winner, the iPod image was clean and clear and very watchable. The nokia stream was so poor in quality that it was basically unwatchable. BBC provide a higher quality stream to the iPod/iPhone iPlayer users than the nokia one. Which is a shame as I suspect the 5800 could handle the better quality version. I suspect it is because some operators let you stream over 3G.
So in summary the TV out is a nice touch for quickly viewing photos and maybe emergency video playback. But you get a better quality experience on the handset directly, so fun but not that useful. The one plus was iPlayer on the iPod which worked excellently.
