Why do computer monitors suck for watching movies?

H

hirobo2

Member
On a big computer monitor, I can see the "pixelations" of an HD movie, by which images looked like those 256 color VGA screens of old where it's easy to tell neighboring colors apart and make out bordering regions of different color shades.

Do TV's apply some sort of "soft image filter" to the output images so as to "soft blend" the colors together (sort of like anti-aliasing but applied to an image that had already been (crudely) anti-aliased)?
Why do movies look so much better on a large TV than large monitor?
 
1. What monitor are you using?
2. What exactly are you watching? A DVD? A Blu-ray? Random mp4 file?
 
1. Samsung 27" monitor vs large 4K TV
2. 1080p MKV movie (2hrs 3-4GB file size)

I'm not enjoying movies on the monitor very much. Is there some kind of filter to make movies look as good as on the TV?

On a big computer monitor, I can see the "pixelations" of an HD movie, by which images looked like those 256 color VGA screens of old where it's easy to tell neighboring colors apart and make out bordering regions of different color shades.
Click to expand...

Btw, when I refer to "VGA-type pixelation", I mean I can make out adjacent color gradients in 32-bit color mode. So yes, monitor is showing millions of colors, but they appear so bad compared to on TV!
 
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The files definitely don't look like crap on TV. And Samsung monitors are not crap. IMO computer monitors weren't really made for watching movies. Which is a big minus b/c I like computers...
 
hirobo2 said:
The files definitely don't look like crap on TV. And Samsung monitors are not crap. IMO computer monitors weren't really made for watching movies. Which is a big minus b/c I like computers...
Click to expand...
So my question is...

1. Why do you believe Samsung monitors are not crap?
2. What is your reasons into thinking that computer monitors weren't made for watching movies?
 
hirobo2 said:
The files definitely don't look like crap on TV. And Samsung monitors are not crap. IMO computer monitors weren't really made for watching movies. Which is a big minus b/c I like computers...
Click to expand...

What if you grab a store bought DVD or Blu-Ray and pop in the disc? Is the quality more on par with what you expect?

I guarantee you, computer monitors are more than capable of displaying high res movies and content extremely well, but like alot of things, not all monitors are created equal.. same goes for digital content played on them.
 
hirobo2 said:
Do TV's apply some sort of "soft image filter" to the output images so as to "soft blend" the colors together (sort of like anti-aliasing but applied to an image that had already been (crudely) anti-aliased)?
Click to expand...
Possibly. Or it could be that your TV has poorer quality so the image is effectively dithered/softened as it's displayed, making it look better (without any explicit filtering).

FWIW years ago when I still used a CRT (on a P3 computer yo), I thought pictures looked better on my CRT at 640x480 than on my 1280x768 laptop monitor, when I had them zoomed in on my laptop such that they were physically the same size on the screen. I don't know if there's an explanation other than being used to it.
 
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