| If you frequently sit in front of your HTPC-enabled TV with a laptop, connecting the two together using http://synergy-project.org/ is amazing, UX-wise. You don't ever have to pick up a remote, or try to get Bluetooth peripherals to work over an 8' distance; you just flick your mouse up "past" the top of your laptop screen, do a few things on your TV, and flick back. It's a bit of the feeling of having a second (big) monitor hooked up to your computer (or using Apple's AirPlay "extend display to this monitor" mode in OSX) but having the two be separate computers is actually a good thing, frequently: • I don't have to worry about having something CPU-demanding (like a streaming Flash player in Chrome) running on the TV while trying to compile on my work laptop; neither one will cause choppiness in the other. • I run all my torrents on the HTPC (because that's where I want to play the videos from anyway) and have QoS enabled on my router, so my laptop's network connection is never clogged. There's also the benefit of the pixels of a TV being far-enough away that you can get away with a lot of scaling. Presuming a 60" 1080p LCD at an 8' distance, turning on Windows' "Extra Large" DPI Scaling, or force-enabling OSX's HiDPI mode, looks really good (e.g. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/47375701/ss20151022-1108...). You only get 960x540 effective pixels from a 200%-DPI-scaled 1080p TV, so some things might not fit on the screen and will necessitate temporarily toggling back to "regular" 1080p. Also, you'll probably want to full-screen most apps, to get something like this (http://i.imgur.com/YDN6VuZ.png). It's a lot like using a netbook. It's pretty great for reading long articles in particular; I find there's less eye-strain than looking at my laptop—maybe because the glyphs are so clear, and maybe also because I'm focusing on something farther than 2' away. |
