DVI, VGA, and HDMI respectively.


Pick a TV or monitor that has a a VGA for your PC, or DVI should you use DVI from your PC, and a HDMI or a DVI that is HDCP enabled for the PS3. The HDCP enablement will allow you to watch movies and play games that conform or require the HDCP protection standard.

Two most important things to consider with choosing a TV for your PC and gaming is pixel mapping and refresh rate. Pixel mapping is how a picture is displayed on a screen in regard to it's resolution. In a nutshell this means that every pixel generated by the video card will display use one pixel on the plasma/lcd tv. VGA inputs on virtually all TV's will give this resulting in a perfect quality picture. If you don't have 1:1 pixel mapping you'll get blurred text and picture as each pixel won't quite map properly. 1:1 pixel mapping over HDMI will work with some TV's and won't with others. This is primarily caused by the TV scaling the input to fit the native resolution of the screen.

Overscan also causes a problem - PC's are a fixed resolution and only go to the edge of your screen whereas TV broadcasts are overscanned and actually extend past the edge of your TV screen. Using HDMI inputs will probably mean your PC picture will extend at least 5% outside the dimensions of the screen which means you may need to use a utility such as powerstrip to create a custom resolution and timing to get around this issue.

HDMI connectivity should be straight forward and be as simple as plugging a VGA cable in but unfortunately it's still some way from being a plug and play solution. This is something the industry is fully aware of however so hopefully we'll see things change for the better.

Refresh rate will affect the way moving images are seen. Slower refresh rates can result in flicker and lag, and as such, motion blur.

Moving with motion blur, this plays in with frequency. Most TV's come in 50Hz or 100Hz flavour. Quick backround : A bog standard TV broadcast is composed of 25 frames (pictures) per second. For reasons that need not be gone into here each frame is split into two "fields" for transmission.

Each field has half the full number of lines, odd numbered lines in one and even numbered lines in the other. These fields are transmitted at twice the frame rate, hence 50Hz. In the TV the screen builds the full picture by scanning the odd numbered lines then the even numbered lines.

A 100hz TV simply does all this twice over. Basically it scans the screen twice as fast as it would if it were doing it at 50Hz and repeats each frame twice. So in a standard set you see the sequence frame 1, 2 , 3, 4 etc in a 100Hz set you get the sequence, frame 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, and so on.

The theory is that it reduces visible flicker since you are now seeing 50 picture frames per second instead of the 25 in a standard set.

100Hz is reputed to be better for fast moving sports, so I guess this can be applied to gaming aswell - quick paced, flashing images etc.

So, in summary You want a HDCP enabled TV/monitor with the input combination of your choice, 100Hz screen, low refresh rate and 1:1 pixel mapping with ideally a 1920x1080 (for 1080p 1:1 pixel mapping on Blu-Ray) or at least 1280x720 resolution (for 1:1 pixel mapping for 720p for PC and PS3 games) (Quick note, 1366x768 resolution that many LCD TV's employ can give mapping issues for VGA/DVI, and overscan issues for HDMI)

Clear enough?