Sorry for the thread hijack, but I'm curious about people's use of monitors as tv replacements. I don't have a tv - instead my second monitor has hdmi input, and I use that for my very infrequent tv watching. I think that the quality of the image isn't all that it should or could be, and wondering if other people have found ways to get better quality HD on a computer monitor.

I've only ever used monitors driven by a PC playing video, not from some other video source, but for those scenarios I've not had any trouble.

The problem with other video sources is that the HDTV timings aren't what a monitor will usually get from a PC. This is particularly problematic in PAL-land, as 50Hz are unheard of on PC monitors, although I wouldn't be surprised if the NTSC "not-quite-60-Hz" caused havoc in the monitor circuitry. Of course, the reverse situation is just as bad. TVs expect TV timings on their HDMI inputs, they'll do overscan trimming, etc.

The draw is that there is an assumption that 'large monitor' == good, and tv == 'large monitor'.

The problem is that what people really want is more pixels, and HDTVs actually have fewer than most monitors.

Monitors as TVs don't work for me because I want more than just me to be able to watch and that means moving the viewing device further back. After moving the viewing device further back it doesn't really matter how much fine-grained detail there is. Whalla! That's a TV! :)

'course I haven't "watched tv" in a couple weeks... but this is beside the point.

I have a small enough room that my 27" monitor works nicely. However I read about HD features - "advanced signal processing, comb filter, blah, blah, blah" - that suggest that my monitor might not be as good quality as a TV just because it isn't optimized for that. I don't have a tv to compare it to unfortunately, but I see things like motion blur, crappy blacks, that make me think it could be better.