The capacitors are going out in my 8 year old 28 inch Hanns-G monitor and I am considering just going and getting a 32 inch Samsung HDTV and using it as a monitor. What are the pros/cons of this?
Since the monitor is bigger will it affect the font size/quality in any way?

There are a few youtube videos out there that will go through the pros and cons in detail. You may have to make some adjustments to make the fonts crisper. If you are a gamer it may affect your refresh rate. 32inch 4k monitors are coming down in price so if you have a video card that can handle rendering 4k, you might want to look into this option. It is basicly like buying 4 monitors at the same time. Also if you do video or picture editing of any kind a lot of TVs do their own color correction, white balance, and make the screen dimmer /brighter depending on ambient light and energy star settings. So you would have to disable and do some color adjusting to correct that. I have been looking into replacing my monitor as well, it has an ugly green line going down it and have been doing a lot of research on this. I am tangled between a UHD TV or monitor at this point. The extra real estate is what is drawing me to the 4k.

The capacitors are going out in my 8 year old 28 inch Hanns-G monitor and I am considering just going and getting a 32 inch Samsung HDTV and using it as a monitor. What are the pros/cons of this?
Since the monitor is bigger will it affect the font size/quality in any way?

Achillestand,
I used a 27" Samsung for my Mac Pro and it worked beautifully. The specs on my tv were supposedly "Gamers" specs, capable of handling all the graphics I could throw at it. I have a new Imac, fully loaded and of course it is it's own monitor and the quality is excellent but I believe my Samsung was just as good.
C. T.

Achillestand,
I used a 27" Samsung for my Mac Pro and it worked beautifully. The specs on my tv were supposedly "Gamers" specs, capable of handling all the graphics I could throw at it. I have a new Imac, fully loaded and of course it is it's own monitor and the quality is excellent but I believe my Samsung was just as good.
C. T.

What is the model #?

My fav grease monkeys use a 42 inch telly as an in the shop monitor.

i built a home theatre pc that's hooked up to my living room tv... i'd say the biggest issue with using a tv as a monitor is overscan. -M

i built a home theatre pc that's hooked up to my living room tv... i'd say the biggest issue with using a tv as a monitor is overscan. -M

By overscan do you mean part of the picture is cut off? I assume the TV is 1080 and pretty large?

What is the model #?

TFVC,
It's a T 260HD, but keep in mind, it's about seven years old. It actually was their "top of the line" when I bought it. It's unlikely that it is still in their product line.
C. T.

The capacitors are going out in my 8 year old 28 inch Hanns-G monitor and I am considering just going and getting a 32 inch Samsung HDTV and using it as a monitor. What are the pros/cons of this?
Since the monitor is bigger will it affect the font size/quality in any way?

At 32 inch I doubt font quality would be too bad (I am assuming at least a 1080p TV, 720 might be fine for using it as a TV but you sit a lot closer to a monitor), it might have a slightly lower DPI than a standard monitor. I use a 42 inch one 1080 x 1920 for my gaming machine, which really excels on gaming and video, you can tell from fonts the DPI is starting to get noticeably lower but the readability is fine, though at 42 inch it is getting to be about as wide as useful for comfortably reading text. If 4K TVs had been out at the time then DPI is not an issue compared to traditional monitor DPI.


i built a home theatre pc that's hooked up to my living room tv... i'd say the biggest issue with using a tv as a monitor is overscan. -M

I doubt overscan is a deal breaker today, especially if it has the plugs for pc connections, my Samsung from four or five years ago handles it automatically if using a PC only style connector and can be configured if it should be used on the rest of the individual ports/connectors.

By overscan do you mean part of the picture is cut off? I assume the TV is 1080 and pretty large?

yep... maybe 10-20 pixels around the entire edge. the result is that part of the "start" menu gets cut off. it's a 46" tv and is a bit old but still a 1080p panel that connects via hdmi. i think many newer tv's still do this. my video card is set to correct for the tv's overscan which changes the horizontal resolution from the original 1920 to something like 1890 pixels.

-M

I just set my tv to just scan when using my pc on it.