Does it matter to you whether you watch a movie on the big screen or on a laptop monitor?
:rolleyes:
Some people have “friends” or “family” who play games together in the same room. Which works much better on a 47" TV than a 21" monitor.
I like how you come in and pro-actively threadshit in some sort of lame attempt to try to imply I was thread shitting. It’s simply factually incorrect to list playing on a large TV from across the room in a single player game as an advantage over playing on a smaller monitor up close. It’s a misunderstanding of very rudimentary facts about optics and perception, a disturbingly common one. I only came in here to address that. I didn’t make any greater proclamations or bash console gaming (and obviously I could’ve - why is this thread even a question?). But good job shitting the thread in some heroic bullshit attempt to imply other people are doing the same.
Depends on the laptop. Sometimes cheap laptops have bad screens, in which case a TV could be better. A recent MacBook for example will have a display better than any TV you can buy, so I’d rather watch a movie on that. A cheap 13" monitor on a low end laptop? It’s probably a pretty close call. Almost any desktop monitor will beat almost any TV at anything resembling typical viewing distances though.
Oh, right, because I’m totally unfamiliar with the concept of having friends or family, because I’m some loser who doesn’t play games on console like normal people. (And actually, I’ve owned an xbox 360 for years, and I just played a bunch of local co-op stuff this weekend on it with friends. HOW CAN THIS BE?!)
The OP isn’t asking about playing Mario Kart with their family, they’re asking about playing a single player game. Maybe you guys should actually stick to the topic of the thread instead of trying to bash me for things I didn’t even say. I came in to address a factual misunderstanding about the nature of optics and perception, and I have to deal with you guys trying to insult me.
The irony of all this is that I’ve actually got a pretty neutral and factually-correct stance in these sorts of threads, and I usually keep things on topic, but people go out of my way to bash me a lot for flaws in their own perception.
But NO ONE mentioned anything about the screen sizes after the OP listed them apart from a single “a 47” TV should have HDMI inputs". And everyone recommended the PC version as well. Yet you decided to drop in a “does no one but me understand optics and math” ? breast-beating post. And of course, TV size is NOT irrelevant, as you said. It has to be taken account with viewing distance and comfort - the OP herself said her couch is more comfortable than her desk chair.
She needs to get a better desk chair 
No one mentioned it, except, maybe, the OP?
The OP listed the 47" TV in the pro section for the xbox. Additionally, the OP SPECIFICALLY SAYS as a con, that her monitor is large but not as large as the TV.
There’s an extremely common, yet obviously wrong idea that somehow a big TV is a better way to view content than a monitor. The only usefulness that size has is when you want it to be viewable from a larger area. People somehow think that size is everything, and I’ve heard a million times “oh sure you’ve got a 22” (or 27" in my case) monitor, but I’ve got a 32-55" TV! As if that inherently trumps it.
But that’s silly. Even just looking at size, the 27" monitor at about 1.5-2 feet away takes up a good 75% of my field of view. A 50" TV at 8 feet takes up about 25%. Numbers pulled out of my ass, but roughly accurate. All else being equal, a smaller monitor closer will beat a larger one further away. Ever try to use a TV to browse the internet? To read the SDMB, you’d have to make the text huge and display only a tiny fraction of the same information you’d have on your monitor, and yet you’d still be straining to use it, right? Because trying to see fine details from a far distance is a pain in the dick. The exact same thing happens for gaming, except that reading requires more precision so you notice when you can’t read something, whereas with a game, you can still get the gist of it and still play, you’re just missing out on all the detail.
It’s really simple and intuitive - a postage stamp sized high res display implanted directly onto your eyeball would be way better than watching a 100 foot wide TV from a mile away, yet I constantly see people bragging about the size of their TV as if that made it superior.
This also ignores that computer monitors almost universally have better fine detail, contrast, uniformity, etc. Always higher resolution, although only sometimes a greater number of pixels.
I don’t know shit about her couch. I’m not being a furniture advocate here. One can’t make factual universal statements about whether people’s couches or chairs are better. Get a nice chair if you’re sitting at a computer for hours, ffs. But I’m saying the logic of “my monitor is fairly large, but my TV is larger, therefore it’ll be a better experience” is so obviously flawed that it’s really stupid that you’re even challenging me on this point.
I don’t think percentage of field of view is the controlling factor here.
Your position isn’t simply a “pretty neutral and factually-correct stance” since it asserts that a certain thing should be valued (namely, percent of field of view). That’s by definition a value judgment, and I think you’re trying to say you’re not articulating a value judgment. But you are.
It would not surprise me at all if the psychological effect of the size of the screen doesn’t directly, or solely, correlate to percent of field of view. Relation of the size of the actual physical screen to other elements in the room may have a lot to do with it as well.
Oh please. TVs and monitors are devices for conveying visual information. More visual information is conveyed with a higher resolution, which is a factor of the amount of actual visual information there, and your distance to it. Having it take up a larger percentage of your field of view both increases the immersiveness of the experience and gives a greater area in which to show detail.
The irony is that you’re arguing for and against the same thing at the same time. The reason people buy and are impressed by large TVs is because they do exactly what I’m talking about. They increase the effectively perceivable resolution and fill up the visual fields. For you to advocate the value of big TVs but then dismiss the value they provide in increased resolution and immersion is silly - that’s the whole reason someone wants to hang a 55" TV on their wall instead of a 32".
And there’s obvious utility to having a TV instead of a computer. You can view it effectively over a larger area, more people can effectively use it at once, you have more flexibility as far as room layout, etc. But when we’re talking about a single person playing a game, trying to capture an immersive experience, there’s simply no way in which a device with less resolution, taking up less of the visual field, further away can be looked upon as an advantage. The idea of physical size being the primary factor in conveying a visual experience is really just a simplistic notion that’s easily dispelled if given any thought at all.
Your argument seems to be predicated on the assumption that what we should value is amount of visual information conveyed. That may be what you value. It may not be what others value. (And it may for all I know only be what you yourself think you value.) You may be assuming that the amount of visual information conveyed is related to the psychological effect of “immersiveness,” but that’s not something we can argue over a priori. It’s a measurable effect, and the question isn’t, what should we find more immersive, but what do people actually find more immersive?
Our bodies didn’t evolve to look at screens, they evolved to deal with medium sized three dimensional physical objects. This is why it wouldn’t surprise me at all that absolute size correlates with immersiveness more than percent of field of view. Absolute size is the kind of thing I’d expect a human brain to be more concerned about than an abstraction like “percent of field of view.”
You’re saying I dismissed something I never dismissed. Also, you’re claiming to know why people buy and are impressed by large TVs but are not giving any particular evidence for your explanation.
For all I know, you’re right about this. But for all I can tell from what you’ve said, you’re not really justified in holding the view.
As I’ve argued, the notion need not be simplistic, and may even be plausible. It’s an empirical question which can’t simply be dispelled through armchair neuropsychology.
So a 100 foot wide screen viewed over the horizon from a mountain top is the ideal viewing experience, and we look at TVs to marvel at the physical size of the actual display box, and not the picture it’s displaying. I find that compelling.
That’s, of course, a blatant straw man.
I felt your arguments are silly enough that they didn’t even merit addressing, but fine.
People almost always seek out bigger TVs, all else being equal. If you gave everyone a free TV, you could predict that the vast majority would take the largest one you offer, all else being equal. Because a bigger TV is more immersive, and you see more detail in the picture. It’s why we still value going to movie theaters (and yes, you are further away from the screen than at home, but the screen is also many times the size of a TV, the end result is that the apparent size is still bigger).
And taking the same display unit and moving it further or closer also changes the apparent size and resolution. Moving it closer will increase the amount of visual information and level of detail - to a point. The actual pixel count has to hold enough information that you gain detail by moving closer, otherwise the actual effective resolution, the information your eye gains, will be lower.
I suspect that if I made this point generally about different sized TVs, you wouldn’t object, but because I specifically made it about computer monitors and TVs, you’re being argumentative. But I may be wrong on that point - I don’t really remember your posting history.
What? Our bodies didn’t evolve to see a magic moving picture box. It’s entirely unlike anything we’d encounter in nature. When you watch a TV, you aren’t looking at the physical object of the TV. It’s not as if people are ambivalent to whether the TV is on or off, because it’s just the same box with some different colors. You’re trying to forget that it’s a physical device in front of you, you’re trying to immerse yourself in the image it’s showing you.
This is why my response wasn’t a straw man. You’re saying that absolute size - a 100 foot wide TV in my example - might be more meaningful than the actual effective resolution and information you can gain from it. So you wouldn’t be surprised if that 100 foot wide TV 20 miles away, even if it’s just a speck in the distance, is more impressive than a 60" TV a few feet in front of you. Because, you know, as long as your brain could gauge the size of that far off TV, it’d probably be more immersed in it.
Because it’s obvious. Your counter-proposal is that people are attracted to large objects inherently. People obviously generally prefer their viewing devices to take up a larger part of their visual field because that’s how we effectively perceive visual information the best.
I’m just stating the obvious, that when you’re attempting to watch something and value visual information, then having it have a higher effective resolution is desirable. You haven’t offered any sort of plausible alternative to that, and that you’re even trying to argue this point is pretty ridiculous.
Nope.
Not necessarily. The best movie theater in New York is the Ziegfeld, and my preferred seats are in the front row of the balcony (behind the yellow rail in this picture). It’s a very large screen, but from where I sit you’re really quite far away, and the field of vision occupied by the screen is probably less than it would be sitting on my couch six feet away from a widescreen TV, and it’s *significantly *less than sitting a foot away from my 24" computer monitor. Yet watching Saving Private Ryan on my computer just wouldn’t be as immersive or as impressive as it was on the “big” screen (regardless of what I did with the sound or the rest of my environment).
Now, maybe there’s no logical reason for that; maybe it’s just a psychological after-effect of what I expected going in, say. But, first, maybe not, and second, even if it is it doesn’t really matter. A subjective preference based on a quirk of psychology is still a preference. If someone prefers playing games on their television as opposed to their monitor, then that’s their preference, and there isn’t a whole lot besides to say about it.
An example of an object’s apparent size being determined in part by something other than how much of one’s field of vision it occupies – a moon on the horizon is actually slightly smaller (b/c it’s further away) than one higher in the sky, but it seems larger.
I’m pretty sure movie theaters have higher resolution output. Commercial grade projectors get up to pretty bonkers resolutions. Also note that they have other things like dimmed lights and sound systems. If you’re a clutterbug, you also don’t have a mess of work papers around you on your desk :p.
One of the odd facts is that a computer can easily be built to have more detail than even a high end TV plus a current gen console. My 5 year old monitor is 2048x1152, which is the next step up from 1920x1080. You can get even higher resolutions now. Previous gen consoles only rarely went above 1080x720, and when they did they typically were upscaled. I don’t think even this gen’s go above 1920x1080.
None of this, of course, means you shouldn’t use your TV if you like it, or whatever, but a newer, high resolution monitor that’s close to you and taking up most of your field of view will offer more detail than pretty much any TV+console output you’ll get. I just don’t think movie theaters are a good comparison because I’m fairly sure they have source data and projectors that go far above most consumer-grade equipment.
(Though one sidenote is that monitor size DOES matter to some degree, as your resolution gets higher and higher you need more physical pixels to accurately represent it. We’re nowhere near hitting that threshold, though)
Edit: It also doesn’t matter for watching movies, since the DVD/Blu-Ray/whatever is only going to have data for 1920x1080 anyway at best.
I’m sure that’s true, and I do have to allow for the possibility that resolution/detail plays a bigger role than I think it does. I just dispute the notion that, all else being equal, a small screen *necessarily *provides the same viewing experience as a large one so long as their distances are such that they take up the same portion of one’s field of vision.
Well, that thread didn’t go the way I expected it would when I clicked on it. :dubious: Anyway, I’m exclusively a console gamer at the moment. I played it on the PS3. I often found myself longing for a mouse and keyboard, which I’m not even familiar with using. While it’s probably not “hard” from the perspective of a tr00 FPS veteran, it got hard as hell for me, especially towards the end, and the kludgy stick definitely did not feel like it was improving my experience.
SenorBeef, you really need to switch to decaf.
For what it’s worth, I played on xbox360 and it was fine. Maybe I’m used to the stick. If you prefer the couch, go for it. It doesn’t matter all THAT much.