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You probably wouldn't be satisfied watching HD content on the small computer monitor.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983
B l o g
HDTV on a computer monitor?
June 17, 2006
By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2006, The Post-Standard
A reader asked about using a computer monitor to view HDTV signals from a HD DVR (digital video recorder). I asked my brother Bob to respond, since he's an expert on computer video and HDTV. Here's his reply:
There are so many reasons why this is not a good idea it's hard to pick a starting point. First, your computer monitor would have to be capable of handling the 1920 X 1080i HD screen resolution. Finding an LCD 16:9 computer monitor that would handle this enormous resolution would be very costly, nearly as expensive as buying a much larger HD TV. An LCD computer monitor is designed to be just that, a computer monitor. Computer monitors are non interlaced (progressive) displays. HDTV at its best resolution is interlaced. You would get a lot of motion artifacts. Some (a minority) HD broadcasts are at the lesser resolution of 720p (progressive, meaning no interlace).
But displaying the fast motion and high resolution of an HD movie or TV show could cause a great deal of blurring, which would be distracting to say the least. A way around that problem would be to purchase a large CRT computer monitor capable of 1920 X 1080. But CRT monitors are analog and lack the digital (DVI/HDMI) input. There are however, CRT monitors that have HD analog component connectors. These are usually very expensive professional monitors.
Another compelling reason you may not want to do this is that it seems reasonable that you would not be satisfied for very long watching HD content on the small screen.
Read more.
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