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Monday 27 November 2017

New screen

While I was looking for a new laptop, I also considered getting one with a fairly naff screen, and buying a separate monitor, and that led me to explore eBay's screen offerings.

The first thing I noticed, is that there's a lot of 3840 by 2160 monitors. I'm currently using a 27 inch 2560 by 1440 screen, and 3840 by 2160 would be nice. You can get them for £240 in 27 inch, but I'm thinking that the text would then be really small. And to get a monitor that's 40 inches, costs £560, which is a lot.

I rummaged some more, and found lots of 4k UHD monitors, and then a little light bulb went on in my head.

Back when I was running a Sinclair Spectrum (35 years ago), I plugged it into the TV; that was how they were supposed to be used. Even the original IBM PC (33 years ago) could be attached to a TV, with a terrible resolution (625 lines of PAL was roughly 320 by 240 pixels), and I don't know anyone who actually did that.  But modern TVs can be 4K UHD. Wait-a-minute ... WAIT A MINUTE!

So I rummaged around the internet some more, and I found that John Lewis sold a 4K UHD TV for £329, including delivery. It's a Toshiba television. It has Wifi, 3 USB ports and 4 HDMI ports, and it's the HDMI that I plan to use. If I have a video card that does HDMI 2.0 (and I have at least one such card) then I can get 3840 by 2160 pixels with a 60 Hz refresh rate. The screen is 43 inches, which is a *lot* bigger than my current 27 inches.

It weighs 14 kg with the stand.

Several years ago, I treated myself to a Sony W900 CRT monitor, which was 1920 by 1200 (and in those days, that was *wonderful*. It weighed 90 pounds, I could barely lift it, and it cost about £1000. I loved it to much that when it went dead because of a nearby lightning strike, I bought a replacement. But when the replacement eventually failed, I went entirely to LCD monitors.


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