As title says why cant i just buy a big television and also use that as a monitor, what is the difference
In: Technology
You can use most TVs and monitors interchangeably. Think of them kind of like the difference between a Land Rover and a Lotus Elise. They’re both cars, and both could be used for your weekly grocery shop, but they’re designed with different strengths.
Monitor favour things like high (100Hz+) refresh rates, dynamic refresh technologies and quick response times.
TVs favour things like upscaling, smart features and post-processing.
Currently writing this on a 40 in tv I am using as a monitor. Everytime I turn on my computer I also have to turn on the TV a select the HDMI input. Not terrible but not the best user experience.
There’s definitely tradeoffs, as others have covered. I use a Samsung 32″ M80D as my primary monitor for TV/Gaming/Work. It does a good enough job for all use cases, including casual gaming. I’m old and won’t notice a couple of milliseconds in lag.
Edit: Mine doesn’t have a tuner built-in. I could get an OTA box, but just don’t care.
You can (I do).
Monitors are more optimized for games, so they probably produce faster images and maybe slightly better looking ones too.
It’s not enough of a difference for me, I have a 65″ TV that I’m perfectly happy gaming on.
All kinds of displays exist, not just monitors and TVs. There are also projectors!
TVs are generally sold as an all in one device that includes sound, usually stereo sound, and a remote.
Monitors are generally display only.
Protectors are mostly display only but some have crappy sound.
All of these have various refresh rate, resolution, lag, and ability to show color or even hdr color, and have different amounts of contrast.
They also have different cables, but most TV’s accept HDMI, whereas not all monitors and protectors do, but some do!
They can all be really good or really bad, for example I have a projector that can run at 1080p240hz or 4k60hz with one frame of lag, comparible to some great monitors.
You should research the display you are looking at, and know what’s important to you if in doubt, stay in the category that is usually used for what you are doing.
Some screens are better at reproducing fine text. I have heard OLED is not great at this but LCD is. Most monitors are LCD but there are some OLED ones too now.
Since no one has mentioned this yet, the biggest difference is life span.
monitors are normally expected to have a much longer life span as they are expected to have many more hours of use per day.
cheap TVs tend to have a life span based on 4 to 6 hours of usage a day. Monitors are normally 12+ hours a day
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