Author Topic: Setting up a telly as a monitor  (Read 2255 times)

Offline Cymro

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Setting up a telly as a monitor
« on: November 23, 2016, 07:26:20 AM »
As I get older and more decrepit my specs get ever more complex - you could start fires with them now. When I was a younger man I used a 12" monitor, then I graduated to a fancy 14" one. My last one was a 19" widescreen and it appeared that someone kept making everything on screen a bit smaller every day.

I bought a 20" non-widescreen LCD TV from a car boot sale a couple of years ago because it had a VGA input, but my graphics card didn't get on with it (got horizontal stripes all over the place . . . ) I updated the drivers for the card but no matter what I did  I still got the stripes. Nothing wrong with the TV - it worked OK on my wife's laptop so I shelved that idea for a while.

Then someone recently gave me a new video card - an NVIDIA Geforce 610GT with 1Gb of onboard memory and the capability to use great chunks of my 8Gb system memory at will. It comes equipped with an HDMI socket, so I plugged it into the giant HD TV in the living room to try it and sure enough it gave a great picture.

So now I started looking for a suitable (i.e. cheap . . . ) HD equipped TV to use as a monitor, and found a 22" Bush widescreen one which was 'HD Ready' for £20 on Preloved. Went and bought it, plugged it in and got a reasonable picture on it. Bit of overscan, but I played with the settings on the video card a bit and found that although the TV was showing 1080p @ 60Hz, the graphics card thought it was 30Hz. Quick click of the mouse and the overscan problem disappeared.

But the fun was only just beginning. Although I had a *reasonable* picture on the screen, the colours were a mile out. Reds were really overpowering and the brightness and contrast were all over the place. The TV has its own menu where you can adjust the picture settings - it has Standard, Personal, Soft, Dynamic and Movie modes, with only the 'Personal' setting being customisable. At the same time the video card has its own settings, where I can alter the brightness, contrast, sharpness, colours - either all at once or for the individual Red, Green  or Blue channels.

So, what's the best bet for setting up the TV to give a good picture overall? Do I go for the Standard settings on the TV and use the video card settings to change the effect, or do I leave the video card on default settings and alter it on the TV? And where do I start with the settings anyway? I've been playing around with this off and on since Sunday and just as it seems I've got it right, I discover that I'm wrong.

Anybody have any experience of this please?

If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes . . .

Offline Bee

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Re: Setting up a telly as a monitor
« Reply #1 on: December 11, 2016, 05:43:57 PM »
Assuming your living room TV is the newest set your computer up with that first, then set you other monitor(s) which may be old and fading or funny in some way to match the PC.