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I've been in the market for a new monitor for quite a while now, but haven't found a good fit, precisely because most monitors evidently kinda suck for the price. My requirements are pretty straightforward:

- 400+ nits peak brightness (my room gets really bright during the day, and my current monitor at 250 nits is practically unusable near noon)

- 4k resolution at 32 inch size (so I can use it without scaling while not taking too much desk space)

- < $500 (I refuse to pay more for a 32 inch screen than a 40 inch+ screen in a TV with much better specs)

As far as I can tell, this monitor doesn't exist (suggestions welcome!). Especially problematic is that brightness requirement, every monitor with more than 300 nits brightness I've seen has costed over $1000 for some reason.

At this point I'm probably going to just end up settling for a 40-43 inch TV instead, plenty of those that meet those requirements within the $500 budget, but the last time I used a TV as a monitor, I remember being really annoyed at having to use my remote to turn on the TV after it goes to sleep (turns off?), compared to a monitor which can get woken up by inputs from the connected computer.

Are there any other folks using TVs as monitors here? Curious if people have ideas on how to get around this issue in their own setups?



IIRC, if the TV supports commands via HDMI, it can be woken up from sleep without a remote. It requires extra setup on the computer to work.

I "solved" the issue of my preferred screen size not being available by going retro. It turns out that 12+ year old formerly-expensive flatscreens are a bit rubbish with brightness and power consumption, but they are better than "modern" screens for my preferences.


> Are there any other folks using TVs as monitors here?

YMMV, but in my experience cheapo TVs tend to not support 60Hz refresh rate. Most often it's either 24, 30 or 50, and that's absolutely a dealbreaker. It's fine for a TV, not for a computer monitor.

So if you're trying to save a buck, TV is probably not an option.


I definitely remember a time when this was something to watch out for (early 4k days), and made most TVs non-starters as computer monitors.

I don't think it's true anymore though as most TVs I've seen, even the cheap ones, can do 4k 60hz over HDMI no problem.

This one I've been eye'ing is $500 at amazon for the 43 inch version: https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-43-Inch-Class-QLED-Built/dp/B...

According to rtings it does 4k at 60hz, 500+ nits peak brightness, and even has a 32 inch version (at a even lower $400 price)!

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsung/q60-q60a-qled

It's an absolute steal in terms of specs/dollar compared to pretty much every 4k monitor out there. I'm just hesitant to pull the trigger because of the manual wake up thing, which has really frustrated me in the past.




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