[Wylug-discuss] Buying Advice: TV vs. Monitor vs. Hybrid

[John Hodrien]

On Sat, 18 Apr 2009, Paul Brook wrote:

> Smaller monitors (<=17") tend to be 3:4 aspect, whereas A TV is almost
> certainly widescreen.

Traditional monitor 4:3, widescreen monitor 16:10, widescreen telly 16:9.

> For 19-22" displays there's probably very little difference between a
> monitor and a TV.

While I'd say is that while refresh rates might not matter, response rates
seem to be better for monitors than tellies.  This is entirely anecdotal, as
I've not got any figures to back it up, but I've found you get more trailing
type effects with TVs rather than monitors.

> Large PC displays (24"+) tend to have a resolution higher than even full HD
> TV, so a similarly sized TV will be much cheaper. The same is probably true
> for many smaller screens - you can find cheaper TVs because they're using
> lower resolution displays. If you don't have/care about HD quality stuff
> (i.e. blue-ray disks) then you pretty much don't care about resolution.
> Standard DVD and TV are comedically low in computer terms (~800x600).  As a
> side note, I'm extremely sceptical about HD quality making any practical
> improvement unless you're already using a huge (40"/50") display.

I have to say, I don't agree.  We've got a 32" inch screen in a perfectly
normal sized living room, and if you watch HD content on it then it's truely
fabulously better than SD.  And that's not me being an uber-nerd and sitting
right up close to the screen, this is my semi-aged parents sitting a good few
meters away.

> A TV/Monitor should accept+display unencrypted images. i.e. you only need to
> care if you're hooking your disply up to something that already enforces DRM
> restrictions. Linux basically doesn't do DRM, so this is only an issue if
> you have other devices (typically a blue-ray player) that you want to
> hookup.

Just make sure than the monitor/tv supports HDCP.  And the version can also be
important, although I forget what versions there are.

> HDMI and DVI are basically the same thing, they just use different physical
> connectors. Converting from one to the other is a trivial adapter/cable,
> available for not much more than the price of postage.
> The real difference is that HDMI includes audio over the same cable - this
> uses spare bandwidth on the video lines, so still works even if you're using
> mutant HDMI/DVI connectors :-)

I didn't know that, cool.  There are also control signals over HDMI that let
devices let other devices know what they'd like them to do.  Whether anybody
actually implements that part I don't know.

> In my experience the most important factor is the quality of the display
> itself, whether it be a TV or a monitor. I've seen may to many of both that
> have really lousy colour reproduction or crappy viewing angles.

Thankfully this does appear to be something that's getting much better with
time, although the current breed of cheap Dell widescreen monitors have
atrocious colour reproduction unless you're sat exactly square on.

jh

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