How would you scale down a television into a monitor?

[xKallius]

I have 40" Samsung TV connected to my computer via hdmi. I find it much too large, and would want to scale the display down to a suitable size, is this possible?

 

[InvalidError]

Yes, but not the way you would want. Because this is an LCD display, the size of the pixels (and the large amount of space between them) cannot be changed. You can change to a lower resolution, which will result in a smaller on-screen picture*, but you will also be reducing the quality because fewer pixels will make up each element. It will also cause issues you would run into on a netbook, where you have to scroll left and right in almost every webpage because the resolution does not allow the entire layout to fit on-screen. This is why TVs and monitors are still two separate things - one is meant to look good from far away, the other from up close.

*You may need to tell your TV and/or your computer's video card to leave the signal alone as they tend to resize it to fit the display... You'll know if you change to 800x600 (for example), and it remains full-screen but loses sharpness/gets blurry.

 

[Cymbal Man Freq]

I find colors for TV programming are more accurate on an actual TV. Computer monitors use a different color intensity scale. Very dark videos from YouTube look brighter on a TV.