Large LCD HDTV as a Computer Monitor?

An anonymous reader asks: "I have seen $2000 27"and $1400 23" HDTV LCD sets at Costco, and similarly priced smaller sets elsewhere. I asked a salesperson (elsewhere) if I could try one with my laptop's DVI, and was told that the TVs wouldn't work well. DVI and VGA inputs, 400-600:1 contrast ratio, fast refresh rates (for gaming?), and HDTV capability for other uses, why can't they work? The prices run from as above to very significantly more. Has anyone tried the inexpensive large LCD HDTVs, or the expensive ones, for their desktop? I want to reduce the clutter in my family room and upgrade to highdef? Is it time?"

Comments

It's the resolution, silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think about a desktop at 1280 x 720 at 27". Shudder...

Re:It's the resolution, silly

[T-Ranger]

At that point you stop measuring Dots Per Inch, but Inches Per Dot.

Apple 23" is $2000

[potuncle]

You can get a 23" Cinema display from Apple for $1999 (plus $100 for a DVI to ADC adapter if you don't have a Mac). It displays 1920 x 1200. Plus, Apple's LCD displays are beautiful is design and image quality. Also, if you decide you don't like it or want something else later on, Apple displays have a much higher resale value that any other LCD displays.

Re:Apple 23" is $2000

[Dr. Sigmund Freud]

The size difference is minor

Is that what your gf tells you? Can you do math? When was the last time you saw a shrink? I see the begining of a libido related problem.

When I watch a 16:9 format movie
1) on the Apple display, I see a 1920x1080 picture. That's 2,073,600 pixels.
2) on the Dell display , it would be a 1600x900 picture. That's 1,440,000 pixels.

That comes to 44% more pixels on the Apple display. Hardly comparable. Then of course, if you are pushing Dell, you gotta be smokin' some stuff, dude.

Apple's offering may not be beautiful in every one's eye, but a comparable Sony's offering lists for $3,000 (that's 50% more than Apple's). Even their "sale price" is 30% higher than Apple's regular price. If you buy a Mac you can get up to $500 off the display price.

So, if you actually crawled out of your parent's basement, gave up your job at MucBurger, got an education, become a professional, started making tons of $$, became an outstanding citizen of the USofA by buying lots of stuff, and learned the fine art of conversing with the morons who troll as ACs on /., you'd find that your Dell is not in the same league as my Apple. Next you'll be mouthing off that your Kea is better than my BMW. (I would have actually gotten a Jag, but my patients expect me to drive a Beemer. Ah well!)

Generally, I don't give professional advice for free (the AMA frowns on that kinda behavior). But for you, kiddo, here it is, gratis: Forget about your mommy. Return her panties at once! Move out. Get a job - a Real Job. Drink some kool-aid: Job's kool-aid. You'll find its a lot better that the Dell Dude's reefers. And remember, get your drugs only from an person certified by the AMA.

You are welcome. It was my pleasure.

Large LCD Screens as monitors

[dfinney]

You'll see these fairly often at tradeshows. They make it easy to see the software from a relative distance during a software demonstration.

I bought a large screen LCD for my company to use during such a software demo. We wanted to keep it in our development lab, figuring that a huge monitor would be a Good Thing.

The unfortunate reality is that, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, the maximum resolution when driven by a computer is only 1280 x 768. This means that you're not getting a massive, high resolution display; you're just getting really big pixels.

I spent some time searching, but couldn't find _any_ manufacturers whose large screens could be driven to 1080i HDTV resolution (1920 x 1080). Quite a disappointment.

At a recent AFCEA show, I saw a 3000 x 3000 pixel large screen flat panel display in the Matrox booth. They said it was a prototype display made by Toshiba. They said it would be available in about 1 year for $30K.

Is there someone out there with an EE type background that can explain why, with pixel addressability of 1920 x 1080 we're not seeing any LCDs that can be used at this resolution as computer monitors?

Re:Large LCD Screens as monitors

[Harik]

You can, and I've done it. The reality, though, is that HDTV is designed to display, well, TV. It's very good at video. It's incredibly crappy at B&W text.

Also, 1080i is interlaced, so your video card would have to output interlaced signal. Not worth it.

Summary: Save the HDTV for conference rooms and trade shows.

Re:Large LCD Screens as monitors

[justMichael]

Here is one, that's close, not exactly 1920 x 1080, but 1900 x 1200.

Or if you really have money to burn, you can get one from IBM at a blistering 3840 x 2400 for a measly $8k plus a grand or so for a card to drive it.

Opposing design phillosophies

[psyconaut]

TV: continuous tones, smooth (i.e.) slow transitions, discrete pixels

Monitor: clearly defined, sharp, ability to invididually see a pixel.

Ipso facto: you're probably going to be disappointed trying to use a TV as a computer display.

-psy

Re:Standard TVs?

[sahala]

I have one of my old computers hooked up to a 32" Sony. Watching quicktime trailers, playing silly flash games, downloading and watching a movie off MovieLink, and playing music with visualizations is pretty good.

Browsing the web, however, is a pain in the ass. Text is very hard to read, even with the font sizes cranked up.

Using a TV as monitor for playing media is a viable solution, however, especially if you have your hi-fi sound system in the proximity of your TV. It's much nicer to kick back and listen to mp3s on the couch rather than at your desk.

My take on it, as an LCD HDTV owner

[hawkstone]

Keep in mind that HDTV does not even mean a full 1080 lines of resolution necessarily.

Specifically, I have an HDTV LCD rear projection 50". Its native resolution is 1280x720, but with a little overscan you have to cut that down to about 1200x680 (roughly). I believe this resolution is typically the same for DLP rear projections and LCOS. I suspect that LCD flat panels are the same. Some DLP TVs appeared to me to have a limited color depth and too much dithering was apparent. I don't think this is an inherent problem with the technology, however, as DLP projectors work quite well hooked up to computers.

An "EDTV" plasma flat-panel TV is (IIRC) 768x480. That is clearly inadequate for use as a computer monitor. I think even the HDTV plasmas are commonly only 720 vertical lines. The few TVs that actually have 1080 lines of resolution are mostly CRT tubes (e.g. CRT RP).

The most important question is what the native resolution of these LCD flat panels is, and whether or not there is a computer-compatible connector that makes full use of it. For example, my TV I specifically got because it has both RGB (HD15) and DVI inputs, and I can get a resolution that maps directly to the pixels on the screen.

Unfortunately, this resolution (again, 1280x720) is not really adequate for full-time use as a computer monitor. It's great for the occasional web surfing, but I wouldn't want to do any real work on it.

In summary: If you can deal with the resolution, and there is a good connector on the TV (DVI is ideal, VGA is acceptable), then you will be fine. There's nothing particularly wrong with the attributes of these LCD TVs for use as computer monitors, in general, including color depth and pixel response times. (Once you start looking at other technologies like CRT RP, DLP, and Plasma, these other issues may become problematic.)

Re:My take on it, as an LCD HDTV owner

[lemonboy]

with that explanation be sure to note what the NATIVE resolution is of the "monitor" you are looking at. Sun has rebranded Sony's 24" monitors in the past. Here is Sony's latest:
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP .enfinity /eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-S tart;sid=h-qxIaP1nNqxRON4Ksy7Kuz6sgnNIdpGgmw=?Cate goryName=cpu_Displays_FlatPanelLCDs_20%22&Dept=cpu &TemplateName=item%2fsy_item_b&ProductSKU=SDMP232W %2fB

Projector

[Coppit]

Given that you can get an X1 projector for a lot less, why would you try to put a huge, expensive TV on your desktop? ;)

Video-Fu

[kurosawdust]

I want to reduce the clutter in my family room and upgrade to highdef? Is it time?

When you can snatch the DVI adapter out of my hand, grasshopper, it will be time for you to upgrade.

Re:Standard TVs?

[woobieman29]

You little whippersnappers must be too young to remember the days when hooking your computer up to the TV was your ONLY option? In my day, we had to hook our Commodore 64 up to a 13" Zenith with vacuum tubes - and we liked it!

I have a 42 inch Sony LCD RPTV

[multiplexo]

that I use as a computer monitor with my HTPC. The resolution is not high enough for dedicated work, it's OK for websurfing if I want to look something up on IMDB but the resolution is too low for any sustained work. It is however pretty good for playing Civ III or other PC games and as soon as I get some time I'm going to set it up to play upsampled DVDs.
I never had any luck using the DVI inputs on the TV with my video cards, I'd end up with horribly low resolutions or weird looking stretched screens. I finally went out and got an ATI video card and one of ATI's VGA to component video converters and that worked pretty well with Powerstrip to give me a resolution of 1280 by 680.
Again, it's not perfect, but it's not bad for light web surfing, playing games, etc.

I think I know why

[Daniel Rutter]

> why can't they work?

I talk about this in one of my letters columns.

In brief: They will work, but only for suitably small values of "work", because they'll only accept DVI-HDTV input. That's a subset of regular DVI that only supports a few scan rates. If you can't goose your video card into outputting the resolution and frequency combinations the screen wants, you're out of luck.

Re:Its a very nice monitor but 2k is a lot of mone

[richie2000]

I got the whole sales bitch for a mac pusher because i was bored on the open house day. Nice stuff.

There's a Freudian slip you don't see every day. ;-)

My setup

[Shaheen]

I don't know if I'm too late to comment on this story, but here goes anyway...

I personally have a HTPC (home theater PC) setup in my apartment. The display is a Samsung HLN4365W DLP set. Not the same as LCD, but it accepts the same types of input as a standard HDTV device: DVI, Component, etc.

My PC is a standard Windows XP box. Shuttle XPC SN45G case/mobo, Athlon 1800+, 512MB RAM, WinTV PVR, and a Radeon 9600 Pro.

My display's native resolution is 1280x720p. By default, my video card does not have this resolution enabled. An application called PowerStrip has been around for a good long while that excels at doing things like adjusting vertical/horizontal scan rates, resolutions, etc. in most video cards' firmware & drivers. Note that the display worked fine at 800x600, but then I wasn't making much good use of the widescreen aspect ratio and DVDs from the HTPC were letterboxed in the 8x6 area of the screen, which looked retarded.

So will your laptop work? It's not 100% clear that it will since your laptop probably has an integrated video chipset that PowerStrip may not support. Of course, you might just get lucky and it might work out of the box, too.

The agony of a non-HDTV!

[gregarican]

I recently assembled a VIA EPIA mini-ITX box to integrate into my home theater system. The idea was having a small form factor that would fit into the entertainment center, utilize an RCA out video port for my 51" rear projection TV, and operate with a wireless keyboard/trackball device. All of that came together fine. On paper at least.

Where I was extremely let down was in the quality of the TV display. I don't have an HDTV, just an older rear projection set. I have to enable the Windows Accessibility Options in order to even come close to reading the fonts on the screen. Really ugly Windows High Contrast Black (large fonts). Yuck.

When I called VIA to get the display driver specs versus typical TV specs I was told that 800x600 was the best resolution I could hope for. And that this sort of setup is primarily intended for watching videos. Any onscreen fonts are really pushing it.

Can't complain in that the whole setup was around $600 in all, but I am still amazed at how average TV screen resolution is so much poorer than what a home PC can put out. I guess HDTV would be a good step up for me, but then again I am not relishing shelling out $1500-2000 only 5-6 years after getting my current set.

[/rant]