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Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

daniel.lawrence.lu

291–300 of 543 posts

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#291

I love this blog post. “It can display seven equally spaced vertical columns of text (critical importance), has driver issues (minimal importance), wake issues (who cares), it costs as much as four smaller monitors (this is good), I need a huge desk (hell yeah), there are multiple image quality issues (well it’s not like I have to look at it all day)…” It is like “I spent fifteen hundred dollars on a multitude of has…

I chuckled at "The 8K display is only $1500 at BestBuy!" the "only" lol I spent $400 on my projector that I use for my main screen and it works great. But when I did that I had previously only bought $200 projectors. So even that was not an "only" for me.

It's an 8k projector?

Remember dropping a grand on a 30- inch 2560x1600 on the day and thinking that was the ultimate.

I The 40 to 45 inch is the ideal, otherwise screen real estate goes too far in the peripheral vision.

The other issue was a lot of really big screen. Real estate is managing lots of Windows. With dual screens you can usually been in Mac's ride of applications more easily than with one cuz when you Max on the super big screen it just takes up everything.

And pushes the usually the most relevant stuff is the upper left hand corner that goes to the upper upper left left corner, which actually is pretty far out of your main field of vision.

But I still love the 43-in 4K TV I've been using since 2010 or so

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#292
post #18

After 15 years of having a desk job I find that I’m more sensitive to the position I sit in. My back feels a lot better if I have a single, regular sized screen right in front of me, instead of having additional screen estate on the sides or below (as with a laptop). At the same time I use virtual desktops that I can switch with both keyboard and mouse.

yeah I'm fine with just an ultra wide, no more stacked monitors for me

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#293

I love this blog post. “It can display seven equally spaced vertical columns of text (critical importance), has driver issues (minimal importance), wake issues (who cares), it costs as much as four smaller monitors (this is good), I need a huge desk (hell yeah), there are multiple image quality issues (well it’s not like I have to look at it all day)…” It is like “I spent fifteen hundred dollars on a multitude of has…

I didn't see any mention of how many times he has to pick up his mouse when it gets to the edge of the pad to get the mouse from one edge of the screen to the other.

I find it annoying that they've kind of got rid of mouse, tails and other easy ways of finding the mice pointer.

That's one of the main drawbacks of a massive screen is if you lose the pointer it takes a lot longer to find it. It's not a linear scale based on the width of the monitor. It's with the square.

So 50-in monitor is going to be about four times longer to find a mouse pointer than a 30-in one.

I don't like those hotkeys where you know it highlights it. I like the the mouse tail. That's the one that I can most easily find it. But generally those came out of fashion about 15 years ago

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it compare to working from home as opposed to driving to the office? E.g. let's say I drive 10 miles a day to get to the office vs use an 8k TV at home? If I go out of my way to work from home, would I be ethically ok to use 8k monitor? Back of the napkin it seems like 8k monitor would be 10x better than driving to the office?

I don't think this is an honest question. There's no "fixed budget" of energy that is ethically ok to use. The parents point was that these devices are woefully inefficent no matter which way you look at them. The "best" thing to do would be neither, and is usually to just use the device you have - particularly for low power electronics as the impact of buying a new one is more than the impact of actually running the…

I’d be interested in hearing you reconcile your statement by making an ethical case for the energy use of video games and the hardware that runs them.

Is there a level of energy that is ethically okay to use for video games?

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#296
post #112

> The bezels and gaps in between the monitors introduce distractions and one is limited in how one may arrange terminals and windows across multiple displays. To me, the segmentation is a feature. It lets me offload information density and focus. For example, I commonly have an editor on one screen, a browser on the second, and something like a chat app, terminal, etc on the laptop screen.

Nobody's stopping you from segmenting one big monitor into different regions; and you get to choose how big those regions are from day to day rather than being forced into it.

I have done this in the past using a tilling window manager and it's still better to use different displays. There is something about our monkey brains that makes 'different physical object = do different things' work better than all having it on the same monitor.

I did get it to work for me with thick black bars between the screens, but when you're giving up an inch of screen real estate for every virtual monitor then you might as well get physical ones.

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#297
post #174

Author here, ask me anything! Apart from programming, one of the motivations for getting the 8K display is to look at lidar point clouds. For example the desktop background in my post is a lidar map of Bernal Hill in San Francisco, which I've here downsampled to only 13006 x 7991 px for your convenience [1]. Admittedly, when I bought it at first, I didn't realize there would be so many random issues, as manufacturers…

You COMPLETELY missed the elephant in the room : 8K TVs have really, really massive CPUs that waste a TON of power (150-200w for the CPU, 300-400w for the TV, often!) Think 8 cores of the fastest arm 64-bit processors available plus extra hardware accelerators! They need this extra processing power to handle the 8K television load, such as upscaling and color transforms - which never happen when you are using them as…

> You COMPLETELY missed the elephant in the room : 8K TVs have really, really massive CPUs that waste a TON of power (150-200w for the CPU, 300-400w for the TV, often!)

RTINGS measured the Samsung QN800A as consuming 139W typical, with a peak of 429W.

Your numbers aren't even close to accurate. 8K TVs do not have 200W CPUs inside. The entire Samsung QN800A uses less power during normal operation than you're claiming the CPU does. You do not need as much power as a mid-range GPU to move pixels from HDMI to a display.

> There's a reason why European regulations banned 100% of 8K TVs

This is also incorrect. European regulations required the default settings, out of the box, to hit a certain energy target.

So large TVs in Europe (8K or otherwise) need to come with their brightness turned down by default. You open the box, set it up, and then turn the brightness to the setting you want.

> until the manufacturers undoubtedly paid for a loophole

This is unfounded conspiracy theory that is also incorrect. Nobody paid for a loophole. The original law was written for out-of-the-box settings. Manufacturers complied with the law. No bribes or conspiracies.

> If everybody were to upgrade to an 8K TV tomorrow, then I think it would throw away all the progress we've made on Global Warming for the past 20 years ...

The Samsung QN800A 8K TV the author uses, even on high settings, uses incrementally more power than other big screen TVs. The difference is about equal to an old incandescent lightbulb or two. Even if everyone on Earth swapped their TV for a 65" 8K TV tomorrow (lol) it would not set back 20 years of global warming.

This comment is so full of incorrect information and exaggerations that I can't believe it's one of the more upvoted comments here.

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a single ultrawide at home and dual-monitors at work. Initially thought having one monitor experience was more seamless, but I do miss implicit window organizational aspect that dual monitors provide. And screensharing on the ultra-wide is a pain.

My Samsung ultra wide has side by side mode with two input cables. Screen sharing (and Windows) thinks it’s two monitors but I can stretch windows all the way across both if I want to since it is an extended set

Best of both worlds, I wish there were a way to configure this within the OS so that you could make a single screen appear like 2, 3, or 4 logical screens.

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#299
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You COMPLETELY missed the elephant in the room : 8K TVs have really, really massive CPUs that waste a TON of power (150-200w for the CPU, 300-400w for the TV, often!) Think 8 cores of the fastest arm 64-bit processors available plus extra hardware accelerators! They need this extra processing power to handle the 8K television load, such as upscaling and color transforms - which never happen when you are using them as…

Anecdotally my house draws 0.4 kW when idle and 0.6-0.7 kW when both my 8K screen and my computer are on. Since my computer draws 0.1-0.2 kW, I surmise that the QN800A doesn't draw 300-400 W total --- maybe 100-200 W. I run my screen on a brightness setting of 21 (out of 50) which is still quite legible during the day next to a window. Also, I have solar panels for my house (which is why I'm able to see the total pow…

RTINGS reviewed the Samsung QN800A as consuming 139W typical, with a 429W maximum: https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/qn800a-8k-qled#tes...

The parent comment is completely wrong on nearly every point it makes. I don't know why it's so upvoted right now.

It doesn't even pass the common sense test. Does anyone really think TVs have 200W CPUs inside just to move pixels around? That's into the territory of a high-end GPU or server CPU. You don't need that much power to move some pixels to a display.

Re: Using an 8K TV as a Monitor

#300
post #174

Author here, ask me anything! Apart from programming, one of the motivations for getting the 8K display is to look at lidar point clouds. For example the desktop background in my post is a lidar map of Bernal Hill in San Francisco, which I've here downsampled to only 13006 x 7991 px for your convenience [1]. Admittedly, when I bought it at first, I didn't realize there would be so many random issues, as manufacturers…

You COMPLETELY missed the elephant in the room : 8K TVs have really, really massive CPUs that waste a TON of power (150-200w for the CPU, 300-400w for the TV, often!) Think 8 cores of the fastest arm 64-bit processors available plus extra hardware accelerators! They need this extra processing power to handle the 8K television load, such as upscaling and color transforms - which never happen when you are using them as…

To be fair it's not the energy that you're concerned with; it's the source of that energy.

Private jets can't run off nuclear power grids. Also the real problem-child of emissions is not America. China has a billion more people, what are their TVs like?

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