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Old 01-07-2016, 19:15
FrankBT
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I don't have a TV, and was considering buying a 24" monitor to watch tv progs, films, DVDs etc. Are gaming monitors suitable for this kind of activity?

I was looking at an Asus VS248HR 24 inch, which is a gaming monitor, or an Ilyama ProLite E2483HS1 24 inch LED, which is a more general purpose monitor. I have a 15 year old 32MB Nvidia GeForce2 MX graphics card which works very well with my 6 year old Dell 1908 Ultrasharp Monitor. This has always given superb imaging, but is not a widescreen.
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Old 01-07-2016, 23:19
Chris Frost
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A gaming monitor is going to give you the sharpest image and fastest response time. However, monitors rely on the PC to do all the signal receiving (TV tuner card) and processing (decoding, aspect ratio control etc). There's also the issue of sound. The monitor may or may not have speakers, but it's kind of expected that you'll be using some beefier external speakers. The above isn't written in stone though. The ASUS monitor you're looking at has speakers and a way of changing aspect ratios.

A TV has all the creature comforts covered but won't look anything like as sharp. If your sources all go via the PC rather than needing a TV tuner then a monitor may well be your best bet.
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Old 02-07-2016, 05:21
FrankBT
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Actually I wasn't quite clear. I won't be watching live tv other than occasionally from BBC iPlayer - no tv tuner needed. Most of the time it will be progs that have been downloaded, so nearly all will be on my hard drive.

That particular Asus monitor has no speakers but I already have a pair of external speakers, so not an issue. The Asus is listed as a gaming monitor, whereas the Ilyama is an all-purpose one, yet reviewers have said it's good for gaming too, not that I'll be doing any. I was thinking of the Ilyama as it's a better known make and more flexible. But my old graphics card only does resolution up to 1280 x 1024. Both monitors have top resolution of 1920 x 1080.
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Old 02-07-2016, 10:13
Chris Frost
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Graphics cards that can do 1080p for video playback are cheap now. Hell, even my little £30 Android MX box does 1080p as does the £35 Google Fire Stick and my mobile phone. I'm sure it's different for high-frame-rate gaming when rendering and shading billions of polygons, then again I know one of those screens has a max refresh of 75Hz so that's probably the ceiling of performance. But as far as TV and video replay goes then a modern £30 graphics card would run either screen at 1080p for video use.
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Old 02-07-2016, 11:40
GDK
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There's no reason why a TV can't look as sharp as a monitor of the same native resolution. Back in the days of standard definition (625 or 525 line) video computer monitors typically had a far greater resolution and refresh rate than that, so TV in general would look less sharp than a computer monitor. With 1080, and now 4K, the difference, if anything, is the other way round. Only top end monitors exceed 4K and the panels used in monitors are often the same as in TVs. They benefit in price too from mass production of panels for TVs.
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Old 02-07-2016, 15:49
Chris Frost
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There's no reason why a TV can't look as sharp as a monitor of the same native resolution. Back in the days of standard definition (625 or 525 line) video computer monitors typically had a far greater resolution and refresh rate than that, so TV in general would look less sharp than a computer monitor. With 1080, and now 4K, the difference, if anything, is the other way round. Only top end monitors exceed 4K and the panels used in monitors are often the same as in TVs. They benefit in price too from mass production of panels for TVs.
In theory a lot of that is true. But in practise you'll find that many TVs aren't able to display a pixel perfect image at the panel's native resolution. The TV's own video processing gets in the way. The same processing is also responsible for some of the lag seen in TVs compared to monitors. This means that not only are static images less sharp with a TV but moving images are affected too.
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Old 02-07-2016, 15:59
GDK
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In theory a lot of that is true. But in practise you'll find that many TVs aren't able to display a pixel perfect image at the panel's native resolution. The TV's own video processing gets in the way. The same processing is also responsible for some of the lag seen in TVs compared to monitors. This means that not only are static images less sharp with a TV but moving images are affected too.
On many TVs nowadays there's a specific "Game" mode which aims to minimise lag by switching off picture processing. Even if there isn't a dedicated Game mode you can usually go into the settings and manually turn off various forms of picture processing. Personally I normally turn off any picture processing anyway, even for normal viewing, as I find it can create undesirable picture effects like the "soap opera effect", which tends to make everything look like it was shot on video, rather than film.

Having said that, I would still expect dedicated gaming monitors to outperform TVs, at least in terms of lag. TVs are more general purpose and I suspect there are many detailed settings internally and electronics that are fine tuned specifically for minimum lag in a dedicated gaming monitor.
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