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Comment by Numerlor | Hacker News Reader

Computer monitors have been getting a lot better while being cheaper, with no ads or services. You can get a high resresh rate 4K ips for about $200 nowadays. Display tech is just advancing faster than other tech at the moment

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Huh, interesting. My experience has always been that computer monitors have been more expensive than TVs, even when panels are ostensibly the same. I've attributed it to comparative volume in TV consumers and desktop computer consumers.

At this point (as opposed to a decade ago) there's arguably no difference between a TV and a monitor anymore outside of packaging and the bundling of a remote and input defaults.

How does this work with respect to using a remote? I know something like a Roku remote would work display-wise, but you usually program it to use the signal that the your brand of TV responds to. That way you can use the Roku/whatever remote to turn on the actual TV and control audio. Speaking of, how does audio work for this set up?

HDMI standards allow plugged in devices to control the power state of the TV. e.g. my Apple TV will turn the TV on when I press a button on the aTV remote and will turn the TV off when I turn the Apple TV off.

Audio is a separate challenge, I'm not sure what you'd do there. Do computer monitors have eARC outputs? None of the ones I have do. Again if you had an Apple TV you could pair it with a HomePod (or pair of them) to avoid the issue but that's a niche solution.

Samsung already makes a bunch of "smart monitors", putting there the same software they use on TVs. Not sure about other manufacturers, but would be surprised if they don't catch up soon.

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