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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

I use a 40" 4k curved HDTV as a monitor. It actually has about a million more pixels than this thing and doesn't require any aspect ratio finickiness when playing games or watching video. The only weird things about it are that I have to manually turn it on (DPMS power on doesn't work after it powers off) and the refresh rate is 18ms.

The thing is, I bought mine years ago for $600 because HDTVs have a vastly superior economy of scale. It kind of bothers me that we don't see more HDTVs with a slightly different firmware being sold as monitors. They're usually a lot cheaper.

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I have two Samsungs (55" and 43"), and the lag is dreadful. Then someone told me to rename the hdmi channel I used to "PC" because that makes the Samsung drop all processing of the image. It actually worked. Still not great, but at least not frustrating now. Result might vary which hdmi port you use too.

I play on a 44" 4K Visio and it was okay at 30fps with a 1080p, but I was using the "lower quality" input. When I went from input #1 to #5, boom, 60fps and gorgeous.

Ironically in the early days of PCs (late 70s) TVs were what you used as a monitor (unless you had a printing terminal). To save money eventually someone figured out they could sell a cheap TV without a tuner.

A buddy of mine worked at a computer store back around '78 (if you're from Cambridge MA this was next to Heffron's near MIT). They got broken into one night, unfortunately after receiving a big shipment of hard drives (2 MB behemoths probably costing over a $2K in today's dollars). The thieves had all night to clean the place out and took...all the monitors.

I wonder what happened when they tried to fence those things.

”To save money eventually someone figured out they could sell a cheap TV without a tuner.”

I think it was as least as much to increase video quality as to save money. The antenna signal stage limited displays to the low resolution of televisions, that signal was designed for moving images, not for static text, and converting to the antenna signal and back added noise.

Once you decide to want to improve the use as a monitor, choosing slower phosphors (for a more stable image) and leaving out color (for cost cutting, and because technology for producing, say, 640x480 pixel full-color monitors at consumer prices didn’t really exist) were logical choices, and once you did that, using the tube to display a television signal doesn’t make sense anymore.

I'm talking about the days when you built your own computer (from individual chips) -- pre-Apple II days, nothing as exotic as 640x480 much less color -- in fact motels in those days would still advertise that they had color TVs! We didn't have one.

had similar idea (4k lg tv, one of the last with netcast). what you might want to look out for when picking 4k tv as a monitor:

- backlight pwm. tv is huge and covers most of your fov at monitor distances. pwm burns my eyes off, and it goes away only at ~100%

- some funny sharpening that shows as halo aroud small text, but is not perceivable otherwise. annoying.

if at all possible, test tv with your source before buying.

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