37 inch display questions
 

Hey, guys :)

I was wondering... does playing games like... Unreal Tournament 3 (in short: UT3) work decently on a Full HD 1080p TV of 37 inch?

The reason I'm asking is: I'm planning to buy one, if the answer on the above question is yes; and using it as my PC's display.

I'm planning to buy the Philips 37" LCD-TV, with productcode: 37PFL5604H/12.
As a second part of my question: would you guys recommend me this TV, or do you have any objections/comments about this specific one?

And as a third, and probably most important part of my question: how will I get this TV to work with my PC? I see the TV has got an USB and a VGA connection. If I just plug an USB cable at one end, into my TV, and the other end into my PC, will it work then, or is there just much more to it than just that?

Please, your feedback would be appreciated. :)

Thanks in advance

You can't use USB to transfer the video signal... VGA should work fine though. As long as it is a 1080p TV it should work fine, better question is how will you use the PC since it would need to be placed next to the TV. ;)

ah, so if I just put a VGA cable from my video card in my PC, to my 37" display, everything would work just the same, almost as if I'd plug in any normal LCD Monitor? :)

And don't worry about the placement. The desk I'm putting it on is twice as long, so there's even space enough for another (20") monitor, as well as my PC. :)

But so erm... you won't notice any difference between this TV and a normal LCD Monitor, right? Except it's gotten bloody much bigger, ofc. :-p

ugh, LCD for gaming, you have to go higher end if you don't want to have ghosting :)

jmke, what do you mean?

I currently have a normal 20 inch TFT (LCD) monitor, just thinking of buying a 37 inch in the future, but only if it works, and if it works decently. :)

LCD technology has latency, it takes too long to change images, you get ghosting, PC monitors are designed and build with very low latency in mind , especially those geared towards gamers; LCD TVs can get away with higher latencies due to the nature of the images displayed;

also the dots per inch will be higher on a TV, which is fine if you're using it as a TV screen, but when you go up close, you will notice this a lot more.

A 37" LCD TV with 1920x1080 resolution (in fact, even mainstream 100" TV come with maximum 1920x1080 resolution)
vs
A 30" LCD Monitor comes with 2560x1600 resolution

:-)

well, unless I'm mistaken, for me, the big difference between a 30" LCD monitor and a 37" TV, is the price. ;)

The price, yes. But just like Jmke said, there's the case of the pixels per inch. I've seen some demonstrations at an Antwerp shop (FNAC Groenplaats) with bigscreen LCDs hooked-up to gaming PC's, and to be honest, while the quality was okay, you can't compare it to a 24" desktop monitor. The latter is much quicker to respond and has a crisp picture.
The bigscreen TVs (Sony, Philips, Samsung and LG; can't remember what types) paled in comparison. Very pixelated and ghosting to put Casper to shame.

You must remember that when seeing a bigscreen LCD in a shop, it's usually hooked-up to a blu-ray player, which gives the best quality one can dream of. Don't be fooled here. Playing games on that TV could be great when sitting at the other end of the (preferably rather spacious) room. When literaly sitting eye-to-eye with the thing, you'll be able to count the dots... :)

Dot pitch // pixels per inch... if you sit in front of a 37" TV as you would your 20" monitor, you might be sitting close enough to see individual pixels. That's because a 1080P TV basically takes a 1080 24" monitor and stretches the pixels out... I presumed you were going to use this at a distance, you should physically sit as close to the TV as you plan to use it before you buy. ;)

oh, so the distance between me and the TV is of importance as well? Didn't know that. How much distance between me and the TV should there be then, approximately?

EDIT: JimmyJump, I checked the difference between this TV and a normal monitor, reactiontime-wise, and found this: TV: 5ms, Monitor: 2ms. Now, I don't know much about this kind of things, so I'll ask: is it much of a difference?

With a 70cm CRT@50/100Hz, recommended distance was 3 to 4 meters. I guess it's the same for LCD/Plasma.

I don't know if you are familiar with digital fotocameras, but the blowing up of a screen diameter without the resolution going up as well, is the same as using a digital zoom on said camera. The higher the digital zoom, the bigger the picture, but the bigger the picture, the more blurry it becomes.

Now, LCD TV's have all kinds of filters and tricks to try to compensate for the lack in resolution, but somehow those tricks fail when a computer is connected (except for blu-ray movies). Even with a HDMI connection, it doesn't work optimal. With HDMI, playing a game (in the demo it was "NFS - Shift") resulted in whole blocks refreshing too late, instead of ghosting. meaning, for example, the the top half of the screen was 10 to 15 frames further in the game than the bottom half...

I did a lot of checking myself, as I also considered buying an LCD TV, because some of those suckers come in at very low prices (like €599 for a 101cm WS TV, with Full HD and HDMI --see LG, Philips--)

For the moment, I've set my weary eyes on an Acer B273HU 27" monitor (2048x1152 with Full HD and a HDMI connection, which costs around $420, but isn't on the Belgian website, only on the American. I've contacted Acer Belgium to inquire, but they seem on an early holiday. Or they don't care, of course...

The Acer has an incredible price for such a resolution. Once you go to 30" monitors, with resolutions of 2560x1600, we're talking between €1200 and €1800 here, so that's out of the question for yours truly.

All this being said, if you consider buying a new TV, you could still go for it and try it out on the PC just for fun. But when you do buy an LCD TV, check around and buy one that has at least a HDMI connection and is 1080p instead of 1080i (polarized versus interlaced) because the future of digital TV is 'polarized' beams... ;)

ok, thanks a lot. I think I now have a good vision about this TV. Perhaps I'll go with a more expensive processor instead, and just buy a normal LCD Monitor. :)

As we were trying to say before, you won't know until you sit in front of the TV at the same distance you plan to use it on your computer. Absolutely do this before you buy a TV to use as a monitor, and make sure you can live with it. ;)

unfortunately specs don't always tell the whole truth, you can have black to white latency , or grey to grey;

Usually, the specs are from grey-to-grey, because the response time is quicker in comparison to from black to white...

also, when I mentioned the 'recommended distance' earlier, that was not for best viewing, but a health recommendation for the eyes. Sitting too close to a TV/Monitor is very tiring for the eyes, as they have to keep on focusing all the time. Hence the fact that heavy PC users (like me) screw-up their eye-sight over a period of 3 to 5 years...

For picture quality, it's like Kougar says: just stick yer nose to the TV-screen in the shop and literally see what it says... or was it hear what it looks like... can't remember. Where's my reading glasses :D

in my humble opinion the only time you want a Large widescreen TV for a computer monitor is if your using it as an HTPC.

+1 for a kickass monitor

hmm, I guess I'll take a look at the TVs in shops like Krëfel then, the next few days. See if I like sitting straight in front of a 37 inch display. :-p

krefel, saturn, mediamarkt, vandenborre