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Comment by ssivark | Hacker News Reader

What are the cons of having a large TV as a monitor? I've been considering something like this recently, and I wonder why is this not more common.

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Someone mentioned the latencies for gaming, but also I had a 4K TV as a monitor briefly that had horrible latency for typing, even. Enough of a delay between hitting a key and the terminal printing to throw off my cadence.

Only electronic device I’ve ever returned.

Also they tend to have stronger than necessary backlights. It might be possible to calibrate around this issue, but the thing is designed to be viewed from the other side of a room. You are at the mercy of however low they decided to let it go.

You could probably circumvent this by putting the display into Gaming Mode, which most TVs have. It removes all the extra processing that TVs add to make the image "nicer". These processes add a hell of a lot of latency, which is obviously just fine for watching TV, but horrible for gaming or using as a pc monitor.

It was a while ago (5 years?), so I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure I was aware of game mode at the time and played with the options enough to convince myself that it wasn’t there.

> horrible latency for typing

Was this the case even after enabling the TVs "game mode" that disables a lot of the latency inducing image processing (e.g. frame interpolation).

game mode is a scam. it breaks display quality on most TVs. and still doesn't respond as fast as a PC monitor with <1ms latencies.... it might drop itself to 2 or 3 which is still 2x or 3x atleast slower.

you can think 'but thats inhumanly fast, you wont notice it' but in reality, this is _very_ noticeable in games like counter-strike where hand-eye coordination, speed and pinpoint accuracy are key. if you play such games a lot then you will feel it if the latency goes above 1ms.

Where are you finding monitors with <1ms input lag? The lowest measured here is 1.7ms: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/inputs/input-lag

false advertisements :D

Most people lack an understanding of displays and therefore what they are quoting and are in fact quoting the vendors claimed pixel response time as the input lag.

It’s gotta be the most commonly mixed up things I’ve seen in the last twenty years as an enthusiast.

well atleast i didn't misunderstand my own lack of understanding :D ... -

the part of feeling the difference in response times, that's true though, but I must say, the experience is a bit dated ^^ i see more high resolution monitors have generally quite slow response times.

<1ms was from CRT times :D which was my main counter-striker days. I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though but i've only tested on HD (1080p) - own only 1 4k monitor and my own age-induced-latency by now far exceeds my display's latency :D

> <1ms was from CRT times

I still use CRTs :) However more than input lag, for me its motion. Which is driven by panel response times and I just cant stand even the best modern OLEDs for motion unless its 240hz and up.

> I do find noticable 'lag' still on TV vs. monitor though

Yeah you likely will to be honest. Most even average monitors will be single digit, 1-2ms maybe at most. Depending upon TV model, game mode may only get you to low double digits. High end panels should get you to pretty low single digits though, like 4-5ms.

They measure in a particular way that includes half a frame of unavoidable lag. There are reasons to do it that way, but it's not objectively the "right" way to do it.

Rtings basically gives you a number that represents average lag without screen tearing. If you measure at the top of your screen and/or tolerate tearing then the numbers get significantly smaller, and a lot of screens can in fact beat 1ms.

I'm sure there are reasons with regards to games and stuff, but I don't really use this TV for anything but writing code and Slack and Google Meet. Latency doesn't matter that much for just writing code.

I really don't know why it's not more common. If you get a Samsung TV it even has a dedicated "PC Mode".

"PC Mode" or "Gaming mode" or whatever is necessary - I can tell any other mode easily just by moving the mouse, the few frames of lag kill me inside. Fortunately all tvs made in this decade should have one.

A bunch of the mech eng at my work have switched from 2 monitors to big tvs for doing their CAD stuff.

Lots of us HAVE tried using a TV as a primary monitor, I did for years.

Then I bought a real display and realized oh my god there's a reason they cost so much more.

"Game mode" has no set meaning or standard, and in lots of cases can make things worse. On my TV, it made the display blurry in a way I never even noticed until I fixed it. It's like it was doing N64 style anti-aliasing. I actually had to use a different mode, and that may have had significant latency that I never realized.

Displays are tricky, because it can be hard to notice how good or bad one is without a comparison, which you can't do in the store because they cheat display modes and display content, and nobody is willing to buy six displays and run tests every time they want to buy a new display.

Depending on the specific TV, small details like text rendering can be god-awful.

A bunch of TVs don't actually support 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, and at 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 text is bordering on unreadable.

And a bunch of OLEDs have weird sub-pixel layouts that break ClearType. This isn't the end of the world, but you end up needing to tweak the OS text rendering to clean up the result.

I have been using a 43 inch TV as a monitor, since last 10 years, currently on a LG. You get lot of screen-space, as well as you can sit away from desk and still use it. Just increase the zoom.

If you play video games, display latency. Most modern TVs offer a way to reduce display latency, but it usually comes at the cost of various features or some impact to visual quality. Gaming monitors offer much better display latencies without compromising their listed capabilities.

Televisions are also more prone to updates that can break things and often have user hostile 'smart' software.

Still, televisions can make a decent monitor and are definitely cheaper per inch.

high latency on TVs make it bad for games etc. as anyhting thats sensitive on IO timings can feel a bit off. even 5ms compared to 1 or 2ms response times is noticable by a lot in hand-eye coordination across io -> monitor.

It sort of depends on what you perceive as 'high'. Many TVs have a special low-latency "game" display mode. My LG OLED does, and it's a 2021 model. But OLED in general (in a PC monitor as well) is going to have higher latency than IPS for example, regardless of input delay.

OLED suffers from burn-in, so you'll start seeing your IDE or desktop after a while, all the time.

I have a couple of budget vertical Samsung TVs in my monitor stacks.

The quality isn't good enough for photo work, but they're more than fine for text.

I have a MiSTer Laggy thing to measure TV latency. In my bedroom Vizio LCD thing, in Game Mode, is between 18-24ms, a bit more than a frame of latency (assuming 60fps).

I don’t play a lot of fast paced games and I am not good enough at any of them to where a frame of latency would drastically affect my performance in any game, and I don’t think two frames of latency is really noticeable when typing in Vim or something.

> But OLED in general (in a PC monitor as well) is going to have higher latency than IPS for example, regardless of input delay.

I hope you mean lower? An OLED pixel updates roughly instantly while liquid crystals take time to shift, with IPS in particular trading away speed for quality.

In the context of this thread that's a non-issue. Good TVs have been in the ~5ms@120Hz/<10ms@60Hz world for some time now. If you're in the market for a 4K-or-higher display, you won't find much better, even among specialized monitors (as those usually won't be able to drive higher Hz with lower lag with full 4k+ resolution anyway).

For me, on macOS, the main thing is that the subpixel layout is rarely the classic RGB (side by side) that macOS only supports for text antialiasing.

If I were to use a TV, it would be an OLED. That being said, the subpixel layout is not great: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...

IIRC Apple dropped sub pixel antialiasing in Mojave or Sonoma (I hate these names). It makes no sense when Macs are meant to be used with retina class displays.

A.K.A. workaround for a software limitation with hardware. Mac font rendering just sucks.

For me it's eye fatigue. When you put large 4k TV far enough it's same view angle as a 27" desk monitor, you're almost 1.5m away from it.

Usually refresh rate and sometimes feature set. And it’s meant to be viewed from further away. I’m sure someone else could elaborate but that’s the gist.

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