[jr2]

tvs make horrible monitors. i hope you like latency.

Still?    I'd like to think that would be fixed by now...

[Klaustrophobia]

there's all kinds of processing and decoding it has to pass through.  i've just been researching for maybe buying a new TV, and one of the articles i read said the signal can be converted as many as 7 times.  granted that was including cable boxes, but some of that is definitely being done by the TV.  it's only going to get worse as more encoding is put on TV signals to "protect" the content.  remember when you could screw a coax cable in the back of your tube and get basic cable?  or TV tuners in computers worked?

[Nuke]

well there is encryption going on. theres also a lot of filtering and resolution conversion, supersampling, interframe interpolation (for 120 hz tvs) etc. its better to buy screens that support a native hdtv resolutions so that at least some of those steps can be averted. tvs dont really care about latency because your seldom doing any thing performance critical. so what if your tv show is delayed by a few ms. its not really a big deal for current gen game consoles either, as most of those demand a lot less performance out of the screen. a computer wants to send an entire frame buffer right the **** now and it gets buffered up the wazoo and can even skip frames on you. also with a lot of the hdmi/dvi/vga ports on those tvs, its impossible to output to its native screen resolution with a computer. you usually sub/super sample from the nearest common resolution.

of course its been a year or two since i tried using a tv, it may be better now. i hope john carmack can have his way with tv manufacturers to get the signal latency in monitors way down.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

I have a 60" plasma TV that I occasionally hook up to my computer. It looks fine. A few milliseconds isn't going to make or break you unless you're playing at a tournament or something. Games on a 60" TV look pretty awesome.

I might use a smaller TV as a monitor, but it would have to be a REALLY nice TV; good contrast ratio, response time, etc etc.

[Ghostavo]

TVs generally suck as PC monitors for the simple reason that their pixel per inch ratio is incredibly low, resulting in an overall lower resolution.

[Polpolion]

TVs generally suck as PC monitors for the simple reason that their pixel per inch ratio is incredibly low, resulting in an overall lower resolution.

Assuming you sit as close to the tv as you would a conventional computer monitor, yes, but I'd imagine that's the entire reason you'd use a tv instead of a monitor: so you could sit on the couch on the other side of the room and still see things.

[Klaustrophobia]

i had to use my 32" LCD HDTV as a monitor for a while when i moved, before my real monitor arrived.  it really wasn't that bad, but definitely slightly inferior.  it was kindof fuzzy at ANY resolution, even it's native.  like it really WASN'T native 1080p.  i didn't do much (any?) gaming while i was using it, so i didn't really notice the lag.  since then i've occasionally put it on clone with my normal monitor, and there you can DEFINITELY see the lag. 

[butter_pat_head]

i had to use my 32" LCD HDTV as a monitor for a while when i moved, before my real monitor arrived.  it really wasn't that bad, but definitely slightly inferior.  it was kindof fuzzy at ANY resolution, even it's native.  like it really WASN'T native 1080p. 

Sounds like your TV's overscan was turned on.  Overscan is when the electron beam of a CRT screen passes outside the viewable area of the screen and all CRTs had different amounts.  Broadcasters know about this and generally don't bother to clean up this area (for SD transmissions at least).  Now flat panel TVs don't build up the image like CRTs do so there is always a guaranteed amount of screen area and can show all of the broadcast image.  Theres a problem tho, called 'the average person'.  The average person does not like to see garbage around the edge of the image.  So flat panel manufactures added in a simulated overscan by zooming in the picture slightly.  Gets rid of the junk in SD broadcasts, kills the sharpness in a native 1080p image.  Most modern TVs have the ability to turn it off somehow.  Most put the option into the screen aspect control selction, some (like Panasonic) have it as a seperate option buried away in a menu somewhere.

Also once you have that sorted, if the TV doesn't do it for you automatically turn the sharpness all the way down or if its one of those odd TVs like Philips then stick the setting in the middle.  Artificial sharpness filters again remove detail from native 1080p images.  The early Sony BraviaEngine equiped sets had a problem where the sharpness filter was on all the time unless you switched to photo viewing mode (which made the TV unable to cope with anything much over 24Hz refresh.  OK for films, no good for games).

i didn't do much (any?) gaming while i was using it, so i didn't really notice the lag.  since then i've occasionally put it on clone with my normal monitor, and there you can DEFINITELY see the lag. 

Some TVs have a special mode to reduce the image processing and reduce the input lag effect.  Usually it's called Game mode or if your TV has a PC mode try that.

[Mr. Vega]

By the way, I talked myself into another Radeon. An MSI Twin Frozr 7850 OC, to be exact. The price and the performance ratio did have something to do with it. Looking back a lot of blame can be put on my super slow old cpu (a goddamn Pentium D) for my bad experiences, which shouldn't be a problem seeing as my new comp is a core i7. Ok ATI, I'll roll the dice with you one more time, with a genuine performance card, and see how it goes.

[Klaustrophobia]

the "genuine performance card" would have been the 7950. 

[Mr. Vega]

My last radeon before that was a 4670. And I don't have 320 dollars to spare (and the 7870 has almost the exact same performance as the 7950 anyway so it's kinda dumb to get one).