Home cinema system

Just switched to a mac from windows and its got me thinking; I am toying with the idea of replacing my tv which has a sky digital box attached to it with an imac mini and a wide screen monitor (maybe apple, maybe dell) along with an 'eye tv 200' such that I can plug in my sky box to the eye tv and then feed the monitor (24") with the sky channels. I'm a bit of a newbie on this and have several questions if anybody can help.

Will I get HDTV when its available from sky on the monitor be it the Apple 23" or the 'Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW 24" widescreen LCD Flat Panel Monitor'.

I have the 'Miglia TVMini on my Mac Intel Duo at the moment and its good but the picture is a little grainy, will the 'Eye TV 200' produce a better picture on the monitor I choose from the above?

T.I.A.

Adrian

Okay... what are you going to use the setup for? A Home theatre in your family/medai room? Or will this still be used as your main computer?

The reason being, unless you are into designing or major film editing, do not spend the money on an apple monitor to use it for just Movies or TV! I'm not saying Apple Monitors are not worth the price, (I have 2 30 in Displays). If you have the money spend away.... If not invest into something bigger at about the same cost, like a 50" Panasonic HD Display or something, that's what you want for a theatre.... then, there is 2 ways here... take your mini-mac and turn it into a mini-media server by either mounting it behind ythe display or in a cabinet, you can direct connect it to the DISPLAY! Me? I have G5 in my office closet that serves media through my whole house... and not all that expensive.

Now, if this setup is for home pc in your office.... Get the Apple Display, mount it on the wall where you sit... you can run cable, Satelitte whatever you want... just do a little research on the RIGHT equipment you will need... what i would do is make sure your video excepts cable line, and BOOM!

The setup will be in our day room, I have a Mac Duo in there already but my two kids who use the room primarily, squabble over the Mac Duo. We need to replace the old TV so I thought I would take the oppurtunty to install the Mini for a second station but with the potential to use the setup as my TV (for the kids). My main concern is whether the picture quality when used as a TV is as good as the TV we have now.

Thanks for your original response MadRhino

I have purchased and setup a mac mini, a sony 26" widescreen lcd tv and an eyetv 200 and all works well together I am feeding my sky digital through the eyetv 200 but as yet have not upgraded the eyetv 200 software, I am using the supplied converter to change the signal out from the mac from dvi to vga and am getting a reasonable picture on the tv but it is in 4:3 even at full screen. I intend to buy a dvi to hdmi converter cable since this is how my tv receives hd input. My question; will I get full widescreen if I update the eyetv 200 software and use the dvi to hdmi converter cable?

Not sure on the inputs/outputs of the Eye TV but I know Sky HD will come with either just an HDMI connection, or HDMI and compoent, so to get an HD feed from Sky into your Mini (I assume that's what you want to do) you'll need to make sure Eye TV has either HDMI, DVI or component in otherwise you would need to use the Scart connection coming out of the SKy box, which won't be HD.