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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

And here I am with a Vizio 40" 4k[1] that I got for less than $500. It's not perfect, and the refresh rate is only 60Hz for 4k (which is the same as this Dell offering), but it's served me well for the last six months at a fraction of the cost and with more pixels.

1: http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/vizio/d-series-4k-2016

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I've done the TV as a monitor thing, and the value is good, but the picture will be nowhere near as nice as a real monitor. Color reproduction is usually really inaccurate and even when you turn all the sharpening and post-processing off that they will let you, you still have an inferior picture.

That said, for gaming they are a solid choice and $500 is obviously a whole lot cheaper.

If you're just using it for something like coding and browsing the web is it good enough?

I found the site I linked, rtings.com, to be invaluable in getting the specifics of television lines and their capabilities and qualities. Different TVs will have varying levels of picture quality, and making sure you turn off (and can turn off) various settings that help a TV experience but hurt of computer monitor experience (motion blur, etc) is important. The one I chose had a fairly low display lag for 4k, and supported a "game mode" (which many do). It takes a bit of research to figure out what you should be looking for, but there are some good resources you can find by googling (articles, subreddits) that let you know what are likely the most important attributes in general, and you have to supplement that with your own specific needs.

I don't have one, coworker does, but for coding it shouldn't be too bad. Browsing usually means more scrolling and so you actually will get tearing but if you don't care then should be fine.

Your other reply talked entirely about games so I responded to your actual question.

I wasn't talking about games at all. I was talking about input lag, which for TVs as displays manifests in some negative effects, most notably mouse lag.

Many TVs have a mode to reduce this lag and turn off other processing effects that are undesirable when playing games, and that tends to map well to the settings that make for a good computer display experience.

Aah good to know. It wasn't clear from my read of your other comment

I would not recommend a TV for gaming unless one happens to find latency benchmarks for the display. TV's tend to add enormous amounts of delay their buffering and pre-processing layers, latencies that really don't matter if you're displaying a movie.

rtings.com has latency benchmarks for most that I saw, including separate ratings per display mode (1080p, 4k, 1080p game mode, etc). It was invaluable when I was researching what to buy.

Agreed. I bought a Samsung (UN40JU6700) 4k60p curved monitor for ~$800 and it works reasonably well. There are some quirks using a TV as a monitor and I was a little nervous about the screen quality, but it's worked well so far. Also, it's a TV.

edit: I especially like that the DPI is the same as a 27" 2560x1440 monitor.

I think I have the same thing. I really like mine, but without the PC mode the picture would be terrible.

It's really an awesome hidden feature that turns this TV into a really good monitor for the money. Especially for coding and productivity apps.

Have you been extremely annoyed by software that detects a 4k resolution and scales everything to HUGE? I had trouble with this when I got my 40"/4k, and in the end did unspeakable things to the registry to force Windows to always scale 1:1.

No, actually. I don't think I've experienced that at all. The biggest problem I have is that it's actually a docking station setup, and when I pull the laptop out, and have to scale back down Chrome's zoom from 130%, and change PuTTY's font. I may have googled and turned off that in the beginning, but I definitely didn't need a registry hack, at least for Windows 10.

In my experience (routinely using both a 4K iMac and high resolution dell xps with win 10) the mac is still better at doing the "right thing" on its own, resolution-correction wise.

I'd actually go a bit bigger with a 4k to get the pixel density that I want but I like this.

Only downside is gaming... One lower density monitor performs better no matter the graphics card.

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