Comment by tombert
19 hours ago
I swore a blood oath that I would never buy an Asus product ever again, after three terrible laptops from them in a row, but holy hell do I kind of want this monitor.
My main "monitor" right now is an 85" 8K TV, that I absolutely love, but it would be nice to have something smaller for my upstairs desk.
I have a fantastic Asus laptop that is 8 years old now and (after an easy battery replacement) easily does everything I want from it and feels nice and solid. I was so impressed that I recommended Asus to someone else, and what they got was pretty awful.
So basically, YMMV. They make good stuff, and they make awful stuff.
What are the cons of having a large TV as a monitor? I've been considering something like this recently, and I wonder why is this not more common.
Someone mentioned the latencies for gaming, but also I had a 4K TV as a monitor briefly that had horrible latency for typing, even. Enough of a delay between hitting a key and the terminal printing to throw off my cadence.
Only electronic device I’ve ever returned.
Also they tend to have stronger than necessary backlights. It might be possible to calibrate around this issue, but the thing is designed to be viewed from the other side of a room. You are at the mercy of however low they decided to let it go.
You could probably circumvent this by putting the display into Gaming Mode, which most TVs have. It removes all the extra processing that TVs add to make the image "nicer". These processes add a hell of a lot of latency, which is obviously just fine for watching TV, but horrible for gaming or using as a pc monitor.
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> horrible latency for typing
Was this the case even after enabling the TVs "game mode" that disables a lot of the latency inducing image processing (e.g. frame interpolation).
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Depending on the specific TV, small details like text rendering can be god-awful.
A bunch of TVs don't actually support 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, and at 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 text is bordering on unreadable.
And a bunch of OLEDs have weird sub-pixel layouts that break ClearType. This isn't the end of the world, but you end up needing to tweak the OS text rendering to clean up the result.
I'm sure there are reasons with regards to games and stuff, but I don't really use this TV for anything but writing code and Slack and Google Meet. Latency doesn't matter that much for just writing code.
I really don't know why it's not more common. If you get a Samsung TV it even has a dedicated "PC Mode".
A bunch of the mech eng at my work have switched from 2 monitors to big tvs for doing their CAD stuff.
"PC Mode" or "Gaming mode" or whatever is necessary - I can tell any other mode easily just by moving the mouse, the few frames of lag kill me inside. Fortunately all tvs made in this decade should have one.
Lots of us HAVE tried using a TV as a primary monitor, I did for years.
Then I bought a real display and realized oh my god there's a reason they cost so much more.
"Game mode" has no set meaning or standard, and in lots of cases can make things worse. On my TV, it made the display blurry in a way I never even noticed until I fixed it. It's like it was doing N64 style anti-aliasing. I actually had to use a different mode, and that may have had significant latency that I never realized.
Displays are tricky, because it can be hard to notice how good or bad one is without a comparison, which you can't do in the store because they cheat display modes and display content, and nobody is willing to buy six displays and run tests every time they want to buy a new display.
If you play video games, display latency. Most modern TVs offer a way to reduce display latency, but it usually comes at the cost of various features or some impact to visual quality. Gaming monitors offer much better display latencies without compromising their listed capabilities.
Televisions are also more prone to updates that can break things and often have user hostile 'smart' software.
Still, televisions can make a decent monitor and are definitely cheaper per inch.
For me, on macOS, the main thing is that the subpixel layout is rarely the classic RGB (side by side) that macOS only supports for text antialiasing.
If I were to use a TV, it would be an OLED. That being said, the subpixel layout is not great: https://pcmonitors.info/articles/qd-oled-and-woled-fringing-...
IIRC Apple dropped sub pixel antialiasing in Mojave or Sonoma (I hate these names). It makes no sense when Macs are meant to be used with retina class displays.
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high latency on TVs make it bad for games etc. as anyhting thats sensitive on IO timings can feel a bit off. even 5ms compared to 1 or 2ms response times is noticable by a lot in hand-eye coordination across io -> monitor.
It sort of depends on what you perceive as 'high'. Many TVs have a special low-latency "game" display mode. My LG OLED does, and it's a 2021 model. But OLED in general (in a PC monitor as well) is going to have higher latency than IPS for example, regardless of input delay.
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In the context of this thread that's a non-issue. Good TVs have been in the ~5ms@120Hz/<10ms@60Hz world for some time now. If you're in the market for a 4K-or-higher display, you won't find much better, even among specialized monitors (as those usually won't be able to drive higher Hz with lower lag with full 4k+ resolution anyway).
I have been using a 43 inch TV as a monitor, since last 10 years, currently on a LG. You get lot of screen-space, as well as you can sit away from desk and still use it. Just increase the zoom.
For me it's eye fatigue. When you put large 4k TV far enough it's same view angle as a 27" desk monitor, you're almost 1.5m away from it.
Usually refresh rate and sometimes feature set. And it’s meant to be viewed from further away. I’m sure someone else could elaborate but that’s the gist.
What would you pick for your next laptop if you had to buy one?
I had an Asus laptop, but the frequent security firmware updates for one of the Dell laptop that I had makes me think it might make a good candidate in terms of keeping up with security updates.
Not sure for the current latest models for Asus/Dell/HP/etc., but I liked the fact that disassembly manuals are provided for older Dell and HP. I can hardly find disassembly manuals for Asus when I have to do maintenance such as swapping out thermal paste/pads and clearing out the heatsink fins.
I’m only one data point, but I also swear that I would never buy an Asus laptop again. If you are fine with the operating system, a MacBook Pro is the best in my opinion. It’s not even close.
Otherwise I had okay Dell or Lenovo laptops. Avoid HP, even the high end Zbook ones. A framework might be worth a try if you have a lot of money.
I have used a ZBook G1a for the past few months because it is the only laptop with AMD's Ryzen 395+, and while not thinkpad or XPS/Precision tier, the laptop has been perfectly fine.
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You can also run Asahi Linux or Windows for ARM on Macs
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I am a pretty huge fan of Thinkpads. I bought mine a year ago and love it.
My girlfriend's 2 year old Asus Zenbook had easy to find repair manuals and was pretty repairable. Though consumer laptop naming conventions make googling for it error prone.
The main problem was parts. She had a fan that was defective and noisy, and the Asus parts store didn't have it in stock, and there was one on ebay for $30.
But the replacement was easy, the construction was solid, and there have been no issues since.
>Asus when I have to do maintenance such as swapping out thermal paste/pads and clearing out the heatsink fins.
If you have to do this more than once or twice over a ten year lifespan of a laptop, you probably should invest in air cleaning systems. Mid range consumer laptops are way less thermally constrained than they used to be. Ryzen CPUs are essential for that, though I think Intel now has usable cool laptop CPUs
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