External Monitor or 1080p TV?

Hey everyone,

About to get my new laptop HP Dv6tqe in the mail, and I'm planning on attaching an external display. My preferences and uses are listed below.

HDMI
VGA
27-30 inch max, 23-24 min
1080p movies
Gaming (FPS and RTS)
Photo editing (not professional)

Would I be better off with a dedicated monitor? Or is there a good 1080p TV out there for me? Any serious negatives for getting the TV? Which ones are the best quality for each type?

Also, can I divert the audio from games/movies to speakers if connected via HDMI? Or do I need to buy one of those HDMI splitter boxes?

Thanks. Couldn't find a thread search on this. I was expecting tons of ppl of asking this same question.

 

Dedicated LCD monitors have a sharper picture (higher DPI) and higher resolutions.

TV's as monitors is the poor mans solution, If all your doing is playing games, it may not matter much.

 

Yes, you can use your HDMI for audio as well as video, or use the headphone connector or your internal speakers.

The hard thing is your size range. Monitors that size are expensive, but TVs that size are inexpensive. But you generally trade off image quality and sharpness and color if you use a TV instead of a monitor. If you can, you might try seeing if you can hook up your laptop to a TV in a store and see how the picture looks and see if that will be ok for you.

 

I use my laptop to watch movies on my tv. While the image quality is alright for watching a movie, I would not recommend it for playing games. You could always buy the tv first, and then buy the monitor later, or vice versa. However, if you had to pick between the two, I would personally go with the monitor.

 

HDTV is great if you want BIG (37"+) if your staying in the size of regular monitors (20" or under) I would just get a regular computer monitor.

 

Anything out right out now that you guys would recommend in the 24-30 inch range?

Basically, I want something that connects easily and can display things natively or 1:1 pixel versus stretching and contorting the image.

 

I love connecting my notebook to my 37" LG with 1920x1080p matte screen. :3
Mostly use it when i watch video but i have also started playing some games on it.

But if i could not access the settings where you can disable the image scaling i would not use it.

 

Scaling should not be a problem, almost any hdtv has the option to turn it off and if it does not every nvidia and ati video card I know of has the option to do it for you (and this is the way I would do it as generally the software scaling is higher quality anyways)

I love my 37" I used it for web surfing, games, movies. Its good for everything, when I went back to a normal computer monitor I could not settle for less than 24" and the only reason I went back was for triple monitors, but I still have the 37" for console gaming and movies mounted above the 24's.

Id say the quality of the TV felt identical to the dedicated monitors to me, its definitely not photoshop expert certified with perfect colors but it looked just as good.

Considering how expensive monitors get in larger sizes due to higher resolutions and things I would get a HDTV instead unless you plan to use or need the added resolution for something.

Here is a 37" vs 3x24"

 

I use the same 37" Westinghouse as an external monitor for my M11x. Love it. Can't use anything smaller now as an external.

 

@ ViciousXUSMC
Hope the TV image doesent look like that in real life.
(Homebrew enabled Wii ftw at least.)
Lulz, heres some reputation just because of the setup.

Wish i could make a room dedicated to gaming / computing, but i got to much crap and nowhere to place it.
I still havent figured out where to place my 5.1 speaker set. D:

 

Its my bedroom, just one corner of it not quite a dedicated room.

TV Looks great, just as good as the monitors. Just came out bad in picture my room is super dark and the TV is super bright so it was ultra over exposed.