I have an old Sony DV camera that I use as a firewire-to-analogue bridge between my Mac Pro and TV when I'm editing DV footage (which admittedly, is very rare these days). I set the camera in VTR mode, plug it into the computer by firewire, and plug it into the TV with a mini-RCA cable. Change the video output setting in FCP and it's set to go. Simple enough... nothing special there.
The other day I got a new (to me) Sony PVM-14L5 broadcast monitor so that I can do proper colour correction. Besides the multitude of component inputs, etc, it has an S-VIDEO input. I'm waiting for the Matrox MXO2 Mini to come out to set everything up correctly, but I tried a little experiment in the meantime: I hooked up the S-VIDEO from the camera to the monitor. Of course it worked, but what I think is cool is that it simultaneously output to the TV by RCA.
These older Sony DV cameras (I've used both a TRV-30 and a TRV-17) can be purchased for next to nothing on ebay, and they're really quite useful for this kind of application.
Another great thing about these little cameras is that they pass along timecode information when you're capturing, even though the cameras themselves have no ability to record timecode. If you have footage shot on a DVX-100 or something though, they work like a charm.
And finally, one very powerful, and little known thing about them is that they can play and capture PAL DV tapes in Final Cut Pro, even though they are NTSC cameras. The PAL footage won't play on your NTSC TV / Monitor, but it will play fine on the camera's LCD screen, and can be captured without timecode in FCP.
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