1080P as a monitor - terrible

nheather

nheather

nheather

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Horsham, West Sussex
My son has gone to university and wants his XBox 360 up there. I need to get a TV and I figured it would be good to get a 1080P one with 2 HDMI inputs so that he could also use it as a bigger extended desktop for his laptop.

Problem is, with the Laptop or PC (I've tried both) set to 1080P (1920x1080x60Hz) connected using HDMI, desktop text looks terrible.

It is blurry and shadowy, kind of reminiscent of when you give a monitor something other than its native resolution and it has to scale, introducing artefacts.

I've tried evrything I can think of and have made very little improvement.

Question - is this par for the course with TVs - if so I don't understand why - if it is 1080P and the graphics card is set to 1080P I can't see why it shouldn't be good?

Or have I just got a bad TV - it is a Samsung 22" Series 5?

Or am I doing something wrong?

I'd appreciate any advice or guidance you can offer - at the moment my gut feel is that it is going back to Argos tomorrow.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Look for an 'Auto' adjust button the television.

If it's locked, hold the menu button for 5 seconds to unlock it

Edit: It's a great screen, you won't get much better in terms of hybrid TV's/Monitors.
 
Thanks dLockers,

Can you clarify what I'm looking for?

I can't see an 'Auto' button and holding down 'menu' doesn't do anything.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Generally TV's do produce blurry text when connected to a PC in my experience. The best TV/Monitor hybrid I ever used was a Samsung sm2333hd, though I think those are now discontinued. The colours needed some fine tuning but other than that it was perfect.

Bear in mind that the series 5 is not a tv / monitor hybrid designed for both purposes like the sm2333hd, it is designed mainly as a tv and just has an extra input that can be used for PC's or other devices. With that in mind you could have a look at this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MO-185-SA&groupid=17&catid=1425&subcat=

It looks very similar to the 2333 and I assume will therefore offer comparative quality. I don't know what your budget is though
 
That's nice BluSky, but well outside my budget.

An alternative is a monitor with speakers.

My ideal solution would be a monitor, with speakers and 2 HDMI inputs.

I appreciate that you can use external speakers and they will be better but I'm trying to keep it as neat with the minimum of wiring as possible.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Just tried my kitchen TV which is a Samsung from the same range but it is 19" and with a lower native resolution of 1366 x 768.

That looks really good. Not quite as good as the monitor but not far off and perfectly acceptable.

The 1080P panel by comparison is abysmal.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
I had this with my sons tv, text looked awful. I turned off all the processing and turned down the sharpness etc and now it looks just as good as any monitor. Have a play with the settings.
 
Same here, I use a 32" Samsung 1080p TV as a monitor and initially it looked awful but after tweaking the picture settings to more sensible levels the picture became just as good as my 23" monitor.
 
The tv will have a "game" mode or "just scan" in the video options. Enable it.
Click to expand...

Not this one, just Standard, Movie and Dynamic.

What Gpu is it running? On my AMD card in CCC they is a pixel format option changing this to RGB give me better sharper image.
Click to expand...

Both I tried use AMD but the control panel is quite different on each. On the laptop, it has CCC but even in Advanced Mode there doesn't seem to be anything to adjust - just system information. On the PC it has a thing called AMD VISION Engine Control Centre which I imagine is the replacement to CCC - but even with that I could not see any of the options you are talking about.

The other concern with that, is ultimately this has to work with my son's laptop. I will get a few hours to set up everything when I visit him at university - this TV is just one of the things I have to do. Even if I could get it working with my Laptop or PC, there is no guarantee I could with my son's laptop and by then I will have lost the right to return it to Argos.

I had this with my sons tv, text looked awful. I turned off all the processing and turned down the sharpness etc and now it looks just as good as any monitor. Have a play with the settings.
Click to expand...

I have played with the settings a lot. I have turned off evrything that sounds like auto processing, turned down sharpness. The only one that had a real effect was the sharpness, but even after the improvement the screen still looked bad.


I think one of the issues is that this is a low end 22" TV. So I suspect it doesn't have the features you have on your 32" TVs. I'm also concerned that as it only has one profile for all sources, having to turn off a lot of things to get the monitor to work my detriment the picture on other sources.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
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What are you connected to the TV with HDMI/DVI/VGA?
I have the Samsung 23" 2333HD screen and it looks great on DVI, but previously when I was connected via HDMI I had to get into the menus and set the source label for that input to PC for it to clear up the text.

Its an odd quirk of this series but it worked for me.

*Edit*
To do this hit menu>source list>edit name
find the source your PC is hooked up via and pick PC from the list that comes up.

assuming it has the same menu structure as mine.
 
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The TV is the bottom of the range Samsung 22" (UE22D5003) and has little in the way of setting, certainly done of the ones you are suggesting.

It has three input sources HDMI1, HDMI2 and SCART.

I have played around with all the CCC parameters and they don't really make any difference.

I think what I'm seeing is the limits of the TV and perhaps I am being too critical, some might be fine with it but not me.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Double check your pushing 1080p and not 1080i. I have a second output on a tv for watching films etc. Occasionally it drops the output to 1080i, windows still reports it as 1080 (because it is) but if I go into the nvidia software its running in interlaced. Switching it to progressive significantly improves the picture, even when it's static, which sort of doesn't make sense, but it does.
 
RuMp3l4$k1n said:
What are you connected to the TV with HDMI/DVI/VGA?
I have the Samsung 23" 2333HD screen and it looks great on DVI, but previously when I was connected via HDMI I had to get into the menus and set the source label for that input to PC for it to clear up the text.

Its an odd quirk of this series but it worked for me.

*Edit*
To do this hit menu>source list>edit name
find the source your PC is hooked up via and pick PC from the list that comes up.

assuming it has the same menu structure as mine.
Click to expand...

Not sure if the OP saw this guys post but this. Just bought a 46" Samsung which once the input is set to PC it looks very nice. My mum also has the 2x 22" Samsungs which are fine. You shouldn't need game mode on at all, people are wrong to recommend that, simply rename the input to PC (and make sure you have the HDMI plugged into to the one listed as HDMI - DVI).
 
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