Using TV as monitor

[walt178]

I tried using an LCD HDTV as a monitor for my laptop.  Connection was with HDMI.

• When viewing internet sites, the pictures are great, the text is not.
• When streaming TV or movies, the quality is excellent. Including text.
• On the laptop display the quality is excelent regardless off what I'm looking at.

Is the low quality text typical results?  

Is there a way to achieve better performance using the HDTV?

[viafax999]

it's because text resolution of 1080 may be fine on a 22 inch monitor 18 inches from your face but is going to suck on a 50 inch tv which is probably 12 feet in front of your face and there probably is no way to raise the resolution on the tv.

[gs0b]

Make sure your computer is set to an appropriate resolution for your TV.   For a 1080p HDTV, use 1920x1080.  For a 720p HDTV, use 1280x720.  Use of other resolutions will result in less than optimal images.

Have Fun!

[walt178]

My TV is a 22inch, 720P, HDTV  the same distance away as my monitor.  My goal to use it in place of a second computer monitor. The notebook works for that purpose, but I was looking for a bigger screen.

Changing the resolution to 1280x720 provided marginal improvement in the text. Not enough to make for confortable viewing.  Also the notebook display deterioration was unacceptable. I would have to keep changing the resolution depending on usage.

Thanks for the suggestions though.

[gs0b · Accepted solution]

Ah, it looks like you're trying to have the same image on both the TV and the laptop.  If this is the case, know that you do need to adjust the resolution every time you switch monitors if the TV and the laptop have different native resolutions.  The native resolution is the actual number of pixels on the screen; use of any other resolution will cause the display to scale the image up or down which results in "fuzziness" (a highly technical term).  This is worse with text and other sharply defined media.

Another approach is to use dual monitor mode.  In this mode, you keep your laptop screen turned on and as your primary screen (the one with the Windows/MacOS/Linux menus).  Configure the TV as a second screen and set the optimal resolution for it.  Since you aren't changing the laptop screen's resolution, everything will look its best.  When you unplug the TV from the computer, you'll go back to just the laptop screen with no adjustments.

You'll also find two screens is way more productive than one.

Good Luck.

[walt178]

gs0b, Thanks for the tips.

I do a lot of muti-tasking and one of the programs I run tasks my resources. Using the two existing computers is a lot cheaper than buying a new one that can handle what I do by itself.  My goal had been to simply increase the size of the laptop display.  I tried the dual monitor mode and it seems to work much better than anything else.  Short of buying new equipment.

Now if I can learn how to move stuff around.  Moving a full window is straightforward. But I've seen examples of people moving parts of a window. That doesn't work. Or I haven't figured it out yet.