4K TVs as monitors?

philip2009 · 10 Jun 2014 at 18:03

Just wondering what opinions people have of using 4K TVs as computer monitors? Traditionally if you wanted a large, hi-res, display for your PC you paid a premium for what was to some degree a speciality product. We are at the the early stage of 4K adoption and today you can buy a 4K, 40", 50/60Hz, TV for £850(e.g. Samsung HU6900). TVs will get substantially cheaper in the future - are people going to bother paying a premium for something that essentially does the same job but is labelled a computer monitor?

Jeps · 10 Jun 2014 at 18:16

Well there are a lot of things to consider other then size of monitor and its resolution. First off, the only port on current gen GPUs that can ouput 4K at 60hz is displayport and most HDTVs dont have a displayport input. They use HDMI 2.0 which no graphics card has and you really dont want to be limited to 30hz unless you have no interest in gaming.

Secondly there is response time. Gaming monitors aim for a 1ms response time and there are now a couple of 4K monitors out that also have that 1ms response time. TVs generally have much higher response time which is further increased by the post processing that TVs do (although you can normally switch those features off). Higher response time = more input lag and isn't good for gaming.

philip2009 · 11 Jun 2014 at 06:36

I'm part of the group that has no interest in gaming, I'd imagine the most movement on my monitor would come from video playback. I'm just interested in cheap, large, 4K displays. Will be interesting to see how fast and far prices fall.

pmc25 · 11 Jun 2014 at 07:19

They're not really suitable at all, at the moment.

Of those announced so far, only Panasonic have said that their sets will have Displayport.

HDMI 2.0 can of course run 4K@60hz, but current NVIDIA cards (including Maxwell) can't run the correct pixel clock to output HDMI 2.0, AMD cards can (6xxx, 7xxx, Rx 2xx) but AMD haven't announced a firmware upgrade that would enable them to output HDMI 2.0.

So unless you get an as yet unreleased Panasonic set, or AMD do release a firmware upgrade for their cards, you don't really have any way of doing better than 30hz input at native resolution.

DP -> HDMI 2.0 adapters might become available, but have yet to do so.