Sony KD-43X77L TV working as a monitor

owmyeyes I'm seriously thinking of picking up a 43" X77L to try to overcome my eye strain hassles. Reading the RTINGS review it says you need to use "Graphics" mode to get the 4:4:4 chroma ie good quality text. Trouble is:

The input lag on this TV is incredibly low in 'Game' mode, ensuring a smooth, responsive gaming experience. Unfortunately, the 'Graphics' Picture Mode, which is the only mode that can display text clearly from a PC, has abnormally high input lag, and it's not really useable in that mode, as cursor movements feel incredibly sluggish.

They list ~80ms input lag, which is pretty horrendous, in either 1080p or 4K outside of game mode…!

@owmyeyes How have you found the input lag????

I could step up to the X85K, but it has the same input lag problem. It's also a VA panel rather than IPS, so has a BGR pixel format that is less good for text.

There's another thing to consider (and to verify) if you are suffering from White LED brightness issues. Which means that usually you need to turn the brightness way down - often down to zero - and it still appears to hurt over time. Looking at the official specifications, the X70L does not seem to have Sony's "Triluminos" technology, the latter which is not officially documented very well but I think there's a chance that "Triluminos" means the backlight hardware is at least partially based on Quantum Dots. You can verify it in shops by purchasing a cheap portable spectroscope which you can use to look at the screen. If the spectrum looks like this one from my XG80 (note the wide gaps between colors and the 2 red lines, which in reality look very thin and sharp), then just like my XG80 it may be easier on the eyes for people sensitive to White LED brightness*. Of course, what I wrote right now is only about brightness and not about other issues like flicker.

*For anyone not affected and wondering: this White LED sensitivity does not mean you are sensitive to other lights, too. For example I don't have any issues with bright sunlight.

AgentX20 However, as a VA panel it uses BGR pixel layout so won’t do text as well. You can fix it mostly with Cleartype settings I gather.

That is just a Windows-specific problem. I don't use Windows anymore but I know there are (were?) free 3rd-party ClearType tuning tools that let you explicitly select "BGR" layout. What they do is choose the correct ClearType settings without having to go through those weird selection dialogs. Other operating systems offer such font layout settings out of the box.

My TV has BGR layout, too, and this is not a problem at all if you set the software (the OS font settings) up properly. This is not something I would ever seriously bring up as a reason not to buy a panel at all.

It is also new to me that each and every VA panel is supposed to use temporal dithering and/or to have a BGR pixel layout. I definitely had VA monitors with RGB layout. My BGR TV has an IPS panel. It seems there is a lot of misinformation circulating.

Cheers KM.

I have seen the apps that allow you to explicitly set BGR for Cleartype, and the right-most selection on the first Cleartype tuning tool screen is for BGR format. There was accompanying discussions about how not all apps honoured the Cleartype text rendering including Chrome/Edge and Acrobat (although I saw suggestions that was fixed). Firefox was well regarded when it came to BGR font rendering. There's also the catch that you can only set one mode for Cleartype so mixing IPS and VA screens is not a great idea.

The VA dithering thing was a comment I saw in the forums here, so it's not 100% verified.

My goal is to try to get back to a working "good" home setup, and as something I could build on to give me more security in my working setup, which of course means I'm wary about introducing unknowns. Thanks for your perspective. It's appreciated, when buying the TVs as discussed here are yet more expensive experiments. They're also quite a bit more expensive relatively here in NZ versus the US, and you cannot take stuff back to the store all that easily either.

owmyeyes

Hi, I’ve got Sony KD-43X81J for about two years now. I picked this particular TV because it’s PWM-free. And it’s true, but still I get my eyes dry and red after watching for half an hour or so. I tried different settings of brightness, also tried to set all the settings you mentioned. But still no luck to make it easy on my eyes. I don’t really understand what is the reason of this. Why does it give me PWM-like symptoms (I am sensitive), while not having PWM at any brightness?

I bought the Sony X85K.

I did all the settings, trying everything we've talked about, and while it was wonderous to have all of that screen real estate and I got it looking almost bearable (as in so so close to 'good'), in the end I still got low levels of eye strain, so I took it back.

The underlying problem is that I cannot get a good clean setup on my PC - meaning I cannot be sure of what was being sent to the Sony TV. After foolishly updating graphics drivers a while back it seems something broke permanently in my setup and I cannot get back to my old good setup or create a new one. I suspect something low level has changed in my hardware - that not even GPU or mobo BIOS reflashing seems to be able to fix.

So… the battle continues.

Note - I didn't try the X77L display that this thread was originally about. Maybe it works better… but here in NZ there's little ability to return things to the store used. I went for the X85K as it had better latency figures.