32 inches

Got me a 32 inch tv to use as a monitor. Man do I wish I had one back in the mapping days. Its a perfect size.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Nice. What kind of monitor did you have before this one?

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

A 19 flat

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Ah ya I had a 19 inch monitor before as well, later I bought a new 22" monitor with full HD support (the other one would not go higher than 1440 x 900)

For decent games you'll need a good computer though to play games in 1920 x 1080 though or they'll probably lag much more than on lower resolutions, but it's always still neat for movies and stuff too.

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

If you want 1080p gaming, you just need a mid-range ($200 level) card and a quad core. 4-8GB system memory. It's pretty lax standards now. Games themselves haven't advanced as far as the hardware has. And most games whom even utilize it are completely unoptimized, so you wouldn't be using high render modes anyway.

Monitors are also usually cheaper than those TVs, and usually they have higher resolutions at the same price. I hope you got a deal on it.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Good or bad, I dunno. It seems to be as good visually as my 19 inch monitor was. But, I only had about 1 hour to mess with it before I left for Phoenix.

My machine is a Q9550. 8 gigs ram. 1.9 T hard drives. ATI 6870 1 gig.. Blah, blah.

I have so far not exceeded its capabilities but I have nothing new enough to run on it that could stress it either. I think my games are all old enough to not be an issue.

The TV is a 32 inch 780p HD
I gave $148.00 for it and it seems pretty damned clear. I didn't have an option of a 1080p, but....

My settings though (in the ATI properties utility) have it running at 1080p. I dunno if it will hurt it or not but its clear and sharp to me.

Anyway.. If/when I have issues I'll post them but so far I am satisfied.

(I am not 100% sure about my card. I think its a 6870, but it might be a 7870. My son gave it to me last month when he got his new one and I honestly don't remember. All I know is its way faster than my 4850 ATI was)

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Dude, set it to 720p! There's no reason to render higher. The TV is just scaling the image anyway. (Though, you should check TV info, it'll say what resolution it's rastorizing at. If it says 1920x1080, then the TV is actually 1080p)

$148 for 32" is not bad. (There were some Black Friday deals, but they were mostly inline with this ... we picked up a 51" plasma as a present for my mom. Should be really nice)

If it's his old graphics card, then it's probably not the 7870 (those are AMDs current line and are like $250) The 6870s are like $160.

It'll do what you want as long as you stick to 720p, though. Should be in the 60fps range in most all games too.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

As I am not at home currently, I have no confirmable information:
I am not sure about the resolution. I know it was high. However when I was setting it up it gave me a bunch of options (at the time I assumed it would NOT offer those harmful to the tv)
Most notably were 720, 1080, 720i, 1080i, 720p and 1080p. There were others but I cannot recall, or even if they existed.

I tried all the 720 and 1080 options and all were blurry to me except the 1080p.
The box the tv came in said 720p HD.

Is there a way to ascertain the true specs? I have googled the tv and all the specs listed are for a 2 year old tv that isn't an exact match to the one I have. Same brand. Same size but different ports and hook ups so I am thinking a different model.

(when I get home I can get the model numbers off of the box I guess)

The price was a black friday wal-mart deal.
The tv is an Emerson 32 inch 720p HD

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Yeah, but you have to physically be at the TV. All you gotta do, put a 1080p image on the screen then find the info on the TV itself. It's usually on the remote. It will list the current rastorized resolution of the set. If it says 1920x1080 ... then the box lied :P (not uncommon for lower end panels, actually)

You'd have to write down the model number off the back to actually find it online (if even then)

Now ... I never said it would be harmful to the TV. It's not. All I was saying is, if you plan on playing games on this, and the TV has a native and maximum resolution of 720p ... why make the computer render at double that resolution? You know, for performance. However, if the TV is actually showing a 1080p rastorization of the video ... then by all means.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Cool then and thanx. I will scrutinize more closely when I get home.
All I can remember for sure is that it was blurry till I set the settings to 1080p.
Thanx again Adam.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

One other thing Orph, I found with mine hooked up to the comp I had to use dvi instead of hdmi. The picture quality was better using dvi, alot crisper.
I have a 27" Samsung 1080p tv\monitor.
Somethng to check if it has a dvi input.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Some TVs have PC specific mode, but it's lower resolution. So if you're using it to read text or something, it'll give you a higher pixel density because the resolution will be lower. If it doesn't lower the resolution (kind of rare) then DVI (it probably only has VGA, if it even has PC support) will likely look nice.

A lot of newer TVs combine the DVI into the HDMI 2 slot, so you use an adapter cable.

But, yeah the only downside is usually the resolution gets lowered drastically (like 1024x768) and if you want it for games ... then that doesn't make a lot of sense.

But if you can read text on the screen through HDMI and monitor mode is at a lower resolution (you'll have to check, of course) then HDMI would be the way to go.

Not like your guys' old man eyes are that fantastic to begin with :P

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Yeah, That's what mine is it's a tv\monitor it has hdmi, dvi, etc....
It will run 1080p in dvi ... at least that's what I have it on and it looks fantastic, but I plugged it into hdmi when I first got it and the picture sucked actually and that was set at 1080p also.
It looks great on hdmi 1080p when I run it thru the cable box but not the comp.......wierd! Signal differences or formats maybe?

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

As far as I know, it has to do with a couple things, namely pixel density and the scaling the TV has. There's also a separation of the resolution of a panel ... and the resolutions it accepts. A TV might accept a 480i/p, 720i/p, and 1080i/p signal ... but if the ACTUAL resolution of the panel is 1366x768 (common HDTV panel resolution for lower end panels) then you're going to have some artifacts from scaling images to it.

Pixel density of monitors is generally higher because of text. You have to be able to read it. You can't generally read text on HDTVs because the pixel density is almost always worse. The TVs, considering their size, would have to be UHD (Ultra HD) to get the same pixel densities.

Average monitor pixel density for a long long time was 72 pixels per inch ... modern monitors are more like 92 or 100 (and you should encode your web-images accordingly :P) ... but TVs ... at BEST are in the 80s and they go down from there the larger the set gets ... because the resolution doesn't go up.

a 27" monitor that has an actual native 1080p panel will only have about 81ppi. But a 42" set 1080p, only has about 50ppi ... going larger to like 50 or 60 inches you're getting into 40s and 30s ... which, obviously ... would look horrible if you're trying to read e-mail.

SO, what they did, was they made PC mode. I believe they do a lot of it by scaling ... but basically they take a smaller image and display it over more screen space so you get a parity of pixel density. As a result, the resolution is usually low. Like 1024x768 on some older sets from 2005 and junk. Newer ones are likely MUCH better. But you have to be careful.

Generally ... the best choice you might have is just using the HDMI out on the PC! The PC will prep everything for you and make it look nice and pretty. Readable? I don't know, you generally have to make the characters larger.

The reason why it might look better in one mode vs another and things like that it depends on the panel technology, the specifications, the scaling they use, the pre-processing in the TV ... and all sorts of other crap. And if you run it through even other boxes first ... then there's any number of resizing and post-process algorithms running on the image you're seeing.

But ... rule of thumb would be to use HDMI if you have an option ... unless the panel has a quality monitor mode ... which would be MORE likely the smaller the set is.

You just gotta screw around with the equipment and different modes and stuff and see what looks good. I'd suggest preparing test images and text and things like that so you can adequately compare ... just looking at movies or something like that won't give you the contrast you need for comparison.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.