Monitor or a TV ?

[KaiserJ]

whats the difference between a monitor and a tv these days?

i've been looking at possibly grabbing a massive screen for my comp, and hdtvs are a lot cheaper it seems... is it a question of refresh rate / contrast? and has anyone here had success using a tv as a monitor

[Master-Athmos]

Well you can use one as a monitor but is has several disadvantages. One being that they usually are too big anyway to sit right in front of them. Then their quality isn't that good (if you didn't buy something expensive) and the cheap LCDs especially lack reaction time. So PC monitors are there for a reason...

TVs are cool when watching videos with your friends on it though...

[CarRepairer]

My two cents: Instead of going on about monitors tend to have a,b,c while TVs tend to have x,y,z, just pretend they are one in the same and compare them by their cost and specs. An LCD panel is an LCD panel (assuming you aren't looking at a TV with a tuner, most don't have one) and each has its own size, resolution, refresh rate, brightness, contrast, input ports and various bells and whistles. Life is simpler this way.

[KaiserJ]

@ athmos : well, i'll probably set up a card table and mount the TV to my wall; that was i can still be a decent distance away; and of course, i'll have my existing monitor plugged in as well....

@ car : well, this is what i did off the bat, but then i realized "hey, they are selling them as two different things" and it threw me off.

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/ ... u=V25-4231

should i buy? all i really would be using it for is playing spring and watching porn sports; perhaps a movie or another game at some point but it seems unlikely.

also; i have satellite tv, but no hd box or hdtv yet; i have a decent sized rear projection but its starting to fuzz out a bit; this would be a dual use purchase.

cunning? or foolish

[AF]

I bought a 37" HDTV LCD 1080p, it's an LG one of their latest range, for £480. Its great, the colours are brighter than my 22" LCD monitor. It doubles up as a TV too so I think its well worth it.

[Caydr]

I'm glad you asked about this, I recently did a TON of research but for reasons described below nothing came of it for me.

The difference between monitor and TV is supposedly color fidelity, but honestly in the most recent TVs it's negligible unless you're an artist or something.

Do not underestimate the size of how it'll be when it's on your desk though. A 32" is the largest you would possibly want to get if it's on your desk, and even then you'll want to sit back a bit.

Be absolutely positively sure to get a 1080p set and if possible get an IPS panel, or VA if you can't get an IPS. 720p will not cut it for any computer purpose.

LG's latest line of TVs, the 32LH40 and 32LH30 are both excellent for using as a computer monitor except for one horrible flaw. All the ones I've seen have *severe* problems with color bleed when you have red against black or blue, or blue against red or black. I don't understand how it's possible for an LCD to have color bleed, but somehow it's there. It's a damn shame, I got one for $800 on sale and I had to take it back because of this.

If possible buy it from a store which has a no-questions return policy, like Best Buy or Futureshop (if you're in Canada).

If you have a laptop, do what I did: get an offline copy of the LCD test images from http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ - then go to a store with a VGA cable and if they want your business they'll let you try the various images out on the screen.

If you're using VGA though remember the synchronization images will look bad no matter what because it's an analog connection. If you have an HDMI out, obviously that's a better alternative.

Samsung would be my second choice, they're a good brand but I don't think they make any IPS or VA televisions.

TVs also tend to suffer from input lag but if you do your research you can find ones that have this problem the least. Unfortunately the 32LH40/30 are spectacular in this regard, not much worse than a typical monitor, but they have that color problem.

Good forums for information on TVs and monitors:
http://www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=78
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/

Good site for information on what panel is on a given display:
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/

[Neddie]

If you're just going to play, eh, TV could be fine. If you want to do any art work on your computer you'll have to look around for a decent TV, and even then, it might be better to have a physically smaller monitor of the same resolution for it.

[ZellSF]

TVs generally have more inputs, better viewing angles, remote control, speakers built in and have image enhancements to make low definition content look better.

Their disadvantages are that they generally have more input lag, less ergonomic options and lower resolutions.

This really doesn't matter, you're better off making a list a list of what you need in a monitor and doing some research.

Samsung would be my second choice, they're a good brand but I don't think they make any IPS or VA televisions.

Eh, no one is stupid enough to make TN TVs, Samsung's panels are VA based I think.

[Forboding Angel]

THe biggest difference is that tvs support drastically lower resolutions. If you do get a big TV, make sure it supports the largest resolution that you can find.

[Caydr]

@All TVs are VA guy: Can you give me any kind of reference for that statement? TN panels have gotten a lot better since the old days, it can be hard to tell them apart unless you have a proper test image.

THe biggest difference is that tvs support drastically lower resolutions. If you do get a big TV, make sure it supports the largest resolution that you can find.

This isn't really true anymore. It's all but impossible to find a monitor that runs at higher than 1920x1200 without having to take on a second job to pay for it. (1080p is 1920x1080) And if you do find a cheap one, obviously it will be a low-quality TN panel, which really defeats the purpose of having a "monitor" as opposed to a TV.

32" is AFAIK the smallest size of TV you can get with 1080p resolution, and currently I only know of two, the LG I mentioned above (which is, sadly, an amazing display crippled by some kind of firmware bug), and a Samsung.

Also, if you're having a hard time separating the TN (crap) displays from the VA (good) and IPS (best), an easy way is to look at the maximum viewing angle as listed on the company's website or the TV's box. If it is 178, it's almost certainly an IPS. If it's between 172 and 177, it is most likely a VA panel but could be an IPS. If it's 171 or below, it's a TN or a really crappy IPS/VA.

Also for your information, this is the order of quality:
TN<IPS<S-IPS<H-IPS

I'm not sure exactly how VA (aka "PVA" and "MVA") fits into that. They are far better than TN, but depending on your needs they may be better or worse than an IPS-based panel.

The tradeoff with VA is that response time is much higher. Response time is the amount of time it takes for a frame that's been transmitted to your monitor to actually be displayed. CRTs are considered to be the benchmark, they usually have virtually no delay. TN panels have the next-lowest delay, if they're good-quality for a TN. Next will be IPS-based panels, which if they're good quality will be pretty close to TN-like performance. VA-based panels will always be dead-last, unless something major changes.

Input lag is not necessarily something you will be bothered by. Many people don't even notice it.

Even if the input lag is high, it's still extremely fast. For instance, TVs generally have a refresh rate of 60hz. So, every 1/60 of a second a new frame is displayed. 1/60 of a second works out to 17ms - so if your screen has, for instance, 40ms of input lag, it is only 2.3 frames behind a "perfect" display. 2 frames of lag will most likely only be a problem in shooters, if anything.

[SinbadEV]

I really like my Samsung... very nice for both DTV watching and basic computer using... I'm not a big FPS gamer but RockBand2 (which also is rather frame-delay reliant) doesn't have a bad frame-delay...

it's 46" and works great from about 2.5 feet away at full 1920x1080... colors are awesome etc.

I would agree, buy by over-all needs VS specs/cost... TVs and Monitors are basically the same thing (though TVs still tend to have tuners in them more often... and more HDMI ports)

[bobthedinosaur]

Get a monitor for your computer, and if you watch tv, you are stupid, but if you want to watch movies with friends on a big screen, get a digital projector with a good input and resolution.

[AF]

Caydr I don't get those issues on my LG TV, but LG tvs have a tonne fo picture optimization settings that meddle with colours and backlight brightness etc to give the best quality, which could be what's causing the issue.

I also find setting the picture aspect ratio to widescreen causes problems when I hook up my macbook however if I set it to autodetect from signal it displays correctly with no flickering when plugged in via a hdmi connector.

[ZellSF]

@All TVs are VA guy: Can you give me any kind of reference for that statement?

I didn't say all TVs, some are IPS. Link me to some TVs that are TN.

TN panels have gotten a lot better since the old days, it can be hard to tell them apart unless you have a proper test image.

No it's really easy to tell them apart without a proper test image.

32" is AFAIK the smallest size of TV you can get with 1080p resolution

For most people, way too big for a desktop monitor, which is where the advantage of computer monitors are, you can get 1920x1200 at 24", 2048 x 1152 (!) at 23", 1920x1080 at 22"... and while the next step up in resolution is expensive it's not much more than a high end TV and computer monitors aren't something you end up buying often.

[Caydr]

Whether or not any TVs are TN isn't something I'm going to spend time arguing about. It just seemed a safe assumption that since people are usually wowed by "large" and "cheap", TN would be a common choice, as it is for computer monitors.

Whether 32" is too big or too small or 1920x1080 is enough resolution or not enough is a matter of preference, again not worth arguing about. Beyond 1680x1050 @ 22", I have a lot of difficulty seeing some game interfaces that aren't designed properly to scale with resolution. I happen to have eyes that are trained for fine detail, and even so I have a lot of difficulty in some cases. So for me, going to an even lower dot pitch is counterproductive. If you want absolute image quality, and all the software you're running has been well-designed to scale interface elements when reasonable, yes, the finest dot pitch is ideal. In my case, I wanted more screen estate but at the same time I needed to be able to see individual pixels clearly - for height map editing, for instance. So a lower dot pitch was ideal.

@ AF, what model of LG do you have? If it's a 32/37LH40/30, I would be very interested to know. The problem is best seen on this test image: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php - The blue and red bars in particular are most noticeable, while the yellow, gray, and green bars will appear flawless. What you will (probably) notice is that the shades of red and blue blend together rather than giving you a fine distinction between them. This is not something I was able to solve despite basically 3 days of continuous tweaking of every basic and advanced setting I could find, in any display mode. Even when set to "PC" mode (rename the input you're using to "PC", it will reconfigure itself... yes, really), it had no effect. Raising the sharpness only led to obvious oversharpening effects.

[smoth]

Refresh rates. I have a bravia that I use sometimes and besides that the resolution is not that impressive

[Caydr]

durr....

what?

[ZellSF]

There are true 120hz monitors, but there aren't true 120hz TVs, so sort of true I guess.

[AF]

Samsung and Sony have 200Hz TVs

[ZellSF]

TVs generate frames by themselves, they don't actually accept sources at those refresh rates, so they're not true high refresh rate monitors.