Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Pros and cons of using an HDTV for computing

Jan 7, 2011 6:02AM PST
Question:

Pros and cons of using an HDTV for computing


I'm thinking about getting a new larger monitor for my desktop computer, and wonder about the difference between getting a dedicated monitor and a high-def TV. I'd plan to drive it with a VGA cable, and perhaps have a HDMI cable from the satellite box, too. I'd like to be able to use PIP and have TV in the small inset picture. Getting a TV would also have the benefit of being able to use it standalone. Is this a good idea? How much computer monitor performance do I give up if I get a 32-inch 1080p TV? Please let me know what the pros and cons are so I can make a sound decision. Thanks.

--Submitted by: John P.

Here are some member answers to get you started, but
please read all the advice and suggestions that our
members have contributed to this question.

1080p TV vs. computer monitor --Submitted by waytron
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7590_102-5060660.html

Simplest path to the appropriate monitor --Submitted by trancegroup
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7590_102-5061159.html

It's pretty much similar to a monitor --Submitted by Alain Martel1
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7590_102-5061193.html

Pro and cons of HDTV for computing --Submitted hauschja
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7590_102-5063276.html

If you have any additional advice or recommendations for John, please click on the reply link below and submit away. Please be as detailed as possible when providing an answer. Thanks!

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Not gonna go w/ this
Jan 16, 2011 9:20AM PST

I'm not going to agree with this statement. The LED's are really brite but they still don't have the backs as good as a plasma. Once there is another type of flat panel that can do both what the LED's do and the plasmas that is what I want to get to replace my panny plasma. Maybe the OLED's will be able to do it.

- Collapse -
22" 1080p HDTV
Jan 15, 2011 7:51AM PST

I got a 22" no-name 1080p (1920x1080 60Hz)edge-LED HDTV over the summer for 1 reason: to play my xbox 360. This was my first HDTV i'd ever owned. Before i used a crappy CRT. It was a major upgrade. Recently, i also started using it as my main PC monitor.

PROS:

-Ability to switch inputs between things(VGA for pc, component for xbox 360, hdmi for HD television, composite for old consoles, vhs etc)

-Versatility in general

-built in speakers

CONS:

-May be limited on input for pc's, (usually don't have DVI) but VGA looks fine, and you can always use HDMI.

-Some TV's might have SLIGHTLY lower clarity or color gamut than a monitor, but my no-name is just fine..

- Collapse -
FYI and anybody interested..
Jan 16, 2011 7:56AM PST

Most modern HDTVs also allow PCs to connect by DVI and RCA cables for sound. It might not be the 7.1 dolby sound experience, but it is fine for most gamers. Also using a DVI to HDMI converter cable is another way to go. Usually you have to configure the television to recognize the input as PC or game.

- Collapse -
Re: Pros and cons of using an HDTV for computing
Jan 16, 2011 6:51AM PST

Regarding VGA vs. HDMI: not so fast with your judgements.
Analog VGA can provide pretty good picture quality, if all the components are up to it. Most integrated graphics subsystems in relatively new chipsets (several years back) should be good enough - provided that the motherboard vendor didn't add an overkill EMC filter just before the motherboard's DB15 analog VGA connector. Any recent add-in graphical card by NVidia or ATI should do a decent job there. And if you need an insanely long cable, you can make your own - just use some quality 75Ohm coax for the RGB lines. The one good thing about analog VGA is, that the DB15 VGA input on any flat-screen TV will take your signal as a "PC input", and will apply only the least amount of processing to it => no scaling, no insane color enhancements, no edge enhancement, no noise removal. That is, provided that you configure your graphics driver to produce the display's native resolution.

HDMI on the other hand, can be tricky. If you're shopping for 1:1 pixel mapping from your "computer graphics video memory" to the LCD TV's screen matrix, the HDMI input on your TV may not be the right way to go.

More on that here:
http://forums.cnet.com/7726-7590_102-5053436.html

Regarding supported resolutions:

any PC graphics hardware made in the recent years technically supports full HD resolutions - in hardware. With the right driver to configure your timing registers, you can configure pretty much any resolution that your imagination can come up with. Even the "divisible by 8" is not a problem anymore, as far as I can tell (it was a condition with some very old VGA hardware) - that said, there are screens which indeed have 1360x768, rather than 1366x768. For such screens, you should indeed use 1360x768 (= the screen's native resolution) to have all your thin lines perfect (perfect 1:1 mapping of pixels).

The question always is, what resolutions are supported by your graphics driver in the operating system of your choice. If you're a windows user, it doesn't matter that Linux+Xwindows allow you to do crazy tricks with the resolution. In MS Windows, you can select from a fixed set of pre-defined resolutions, supported by your graphical driver (even if you untag the box saying "show only resolutions supported by my monitor", which Windows learn via DDC/EDID). Especially cheaper/older graphics adapters come with drivers with a limited set of supported screen geometries. I believe I've seen a screenshot from some NVidia configurations screen, where you can configure everything down to sync timing etc. - but specifically in the case of NVidia, I'm pretty sure your TV's native resolution is supported out of the box, no need for tweaking. The same should apply to newer ATI drivers. Speaking of Intel, the king of onboard integrated graphics, their "desktop" drivers support a pretty wide portfolio of standard resolutions, and if you're not happy with those, you can still download Intel's "embedded" flavour of the driver, and define your own! (Define your own Xres/Yres, horizontal/vertical refresh and pixel clock, or take some stock video mode and adapt the timings a bit to make your monitor happier, or some such.)

Regarding resolutions in terms of dpi: in the good old days of Windows 3.1 on 14" CRT monitors at 640x480, the resolution was about 60-75 dpi. And I have to say that I still consider 75 dpi as an optimum resolution for any kind of computing. Yes, you can see pixel edges if you sit across the table from the display. And that's the way I like it. That way, my eyes don't "give up focusing" beyond the pixel size - and I can make use of information down to individual pixels.
Alas, the PC displays have quickly moved to higher dpi resolutions: by 1024x768 and 1280x1024, the norm was more like 90 dpi, and the modern-day high-res and widescreen-only displays are well over 100 dpi. The classic Windows interface with fixed-size system font is very little use at those resolutions. Consequently, the GUI design has moved on to bigger fonts, taking up more pixels - as a result, you have more pixels on your screen, but you cannot see an individual pixel anymore, and your effective screen space really hasn't grown...

That's why I've considered using an LCD TV instead of a PC monitor for some time. If you're shopping for the 75 dpi optium for "across the table" office use, a 32" display with the classic 1080p "full HD" resolution should make a pretty good monitor, on the conditions that
1) the color presentation is sane enough for your working needs, or can be adjusted
2) the brightness is low enough for watching from a close distance, or can be adjusted
3) the display can be persuaded to display the pixels 1:1, without futher "multimedia enhancements"

Note that the current LED TV's have a pretty good power consumption, compared to the last year's CCFL models. But on the other hand, cheap LED TV's may have crappier color space (gamut) compared to the previous CCFL model, e.g. the presentation of yellow shades.

Yet in the recent months, I've become aware of one more pitfall, common to all LCD's: the pixel does not have uniform color across its surface. Every pixel really consists of three rectangles, lit up by the three elementary colors (RGB). Thus, a grey line on the screen, single pixel wide, won't look solid uniform grey "across the table at 75 dpi". Instead, you'll see a "rainbow edge", or just three parallel elementary-colored lines Sad Maybe that's one of the reasons for ever higher dpi in the modern LCD displays.

On a good CRT with a "delta" style screen mask, the mask's dpi used to be higher than your video mode's DPI, so that the whole square of the pixel had a more or less uniform color, yet the pixel had a somewhat clearly defined surface. If you tried to squeeze the maximum resolution out of your CRT display, you ended up at a resolution where the VGA pixel size just about matched the delta mask's "triangle pitch" (or, better yet, one step back, to avoid smeared pixels).

With LCD's, taking one step back means scaling/oversampling, and the resulting image won't be as crisp as a corresponding native resolution would be. Theoretically you could use exactly half the resolution at each axis, but that's hardly practical, as it would shrink your available screen space to 1/4th of the native resolution...

Ahh well Sad

- Collapse -
Setup software with keyboard
Jan 16, 2011 10:39PM PST

I'll put in an endorsement for the Zoom ZDTV keyboards, either the Model 9005 or the 9006. The keyboards are designed for use with connected TVS using Windows. They come bundled with software which greatly simplifies synching your graphics card to a particular HDTV. They also have multimedia hot buttons that do a range of useful things for this application and a touchpad mouse integrated into the keyboard. The 9005 is a full-sized keyboard that has a range of 60 feet, the 9006 is a reduced-sized keyboard with a range of 30 feet.

- Collapse -
HD Monitor with a full power PC built-in
Jan 18, 2011 2:05AM PST

I don't want this to come off sounding like an ad, because I'm a CNet member and subscriber to the newsletter in which I saw this topic, but...

The company I work for makes large format all-in-one PCs (Tek Panel). For the last 6 years, I've had either a 32" or 37" commercial grade display with a full powered PC built-in sitting on my desk. Granted our stuff isn't geared towards consumers, but stepping outside my job, I'd prefer to work on these machines to a normal desktop PC and standalone monitor. What I have found is that I don't like "working" on displays larger than 37". It's not feasible to put on on your desk, and I don't like sitting far back from the screen even with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Ideally, I like the 37" here at my office, but the 32" I use at my home office is very good also.

Derrick

- Collapse -
Computer/large screen TV terrific watching TV shows online
Feb 10, 2012 11:36PM PST

I originally hooked up my desktop gaming computer to my 50 in.Samsung 1920x1080 plasma TV to run a driving simulator, but have discovered it's a great way to watch TV shows that I may have missed when they were originally broadcast. I think you would need a reasonably fast broadband Internet connection (we use Cox Cable preferred) and a good graphics card (mine is a Radeon VGA Saphire HD 4850). I feed my signal from my computer to my AV receiver using an HDMI cable and then feed the video signal to the TV using another HDMI cable while the AV receiver feeds the audio signal through my surround sound system. Both the picture and sound quality are very good. I use a Logitech Dinovo Edge Bluetooth Keyboard with the system so I can sit anywhere in the room, although in order to read emails without zooming beyond 100%, I have to sit within 5 ft. of the screen, but I'm 65 and wear glasses for reading.
For example, we just returned from vacation to find I had forgot to set my cable DVR to record episodes of Masterpiece Theater's Downton Abbey, so it was no problem to go to the Masterpiece Theater website to watch the episodes we missed.
I have heard some visionaries say in radio and TV interviews that this is the way we will watch all of our TV in the future, basically making every show available all the time on demand.
I rarely use the gaming computer/flat screen TV hook-up for normal computing as I have a wireless laptop for that. I find it awkward to do normal computing on such a large screen in my living room.