I don’t know about you, but I really like having a huge screen when coding. It seems rather hard (and expensive) to find computer monitors over 27″, yet TVs in the 30-40″ range are abundant and cheap. With the advent of 4K, TV resolution is no longer an issue either. However, there are some things to consider when purchasing a 4K TV to use as a computer monitor.

1. It better have HDMI 2.0. While HDMI 1.4 supports 4K resolution, the bandwidth limitation restricts you to 30Hz refresh. This makes mouse movements noticeably jerky and laggy. Only displayport 1.2+ and HDMI 2.0 support 4K@60Hz. Very few TVs (none?) have DP, but HDMI 2.0 is becoming pretty standard from 2015 onwards. You’ll still want to carefully check the specs to make sure the chroma subsampling is adequate for your needs. 4:4:4 means no subsampling (the best choice).
2. Calibration: most TVs by default display text rather poorly. Some fiddling can be done to reduce contrast and brightness, but ideally the TV should have a computer mode that provides better default levels for text.
3. Size: Bigger is not necessarily better here, since you’ll be sitting about 1 meter in front of the screen. At this distance, typical guidelines suggest 43″ is the biggest you can get away with before pixels become noticeable. Furthermore, the height of large displays may make for uncomfortable viewing. I ended up getting a 43″ display, given the slightly limited choice of TVs in China, but I think 36″-40″ would have been better.

So I ended up getting the ChangHong 43Q2N TV. It fit the above requirements (still need to figure out the chroma subsampling though), but I had to ask the sales rep to install custom firmware to allow computer mode. It’s quite adequate for the job, and cost only 4,000 RMB. There’s no way I could have got that much screen real estate for that price using computer monitors.

Here’s the end result: