I just got the 5000 samsung for my computer myself. It was a tossup between that and a 27" samsung monitor at B.B.
I went with the 32" tv, because honestly the picture looked better (the monitor was a TN screen with fairly bad changes in color & light/dark if you weren't exactly centered in front of it). The tv has a much better picture, I believe it's a VA screen (it didn't actually say), but the only thing that matters is that the picture is great. blacks are as black as the bezel, and color/lightness is dead on accurate, and clear at almost any angle.
And yeah, at 32", for a computer, you NEED 1080p. The dot pitch & pixel density are on the big side, larger than any computer monitor. Computer monitors will use 1080p up to 27" and then some 27's and all 30" monitors are 2560x1600 (my old 27.5" monitor was 1920x1200, a 16:10 ratio with an extra 120 pixels top to bottom). So, 1080p at 32" is going to have noticeably larger pixels than you're used to. However, if it's a good screen (and i do like the samsung 5000's screen) and you sit with your eyes at least 1 meter from the screen, it works great. Just don't expect to hunch forward in your chair leaning up close to the screen, it will look like a pixelated mess. I would not recommend any tv larger than 32"-1080p for desktop sitting distances, as the pixel density will force you further away from the screen than a desk usually provides.
Look at pixel density this way, 1080p on a 32" screen viewed from 3ft away will look very much the same as 1080p on a 27" screen viewed from 2.5ft away. So the larger screen only has value if you want to dual-use it, or it just has a better picture. Because if you lean back to avoid seeing the dot pitch, then your view is pretty much the same as if you had a smaller monitor with a finer dot pitch and didn't lean back. But if you want to sit back a bit, maybe split-screen a game with a friend, or use it as a video display where you're not sitting right in front of it sometimes, then 32" is great. If you want a more eye-filling view, with fine dot pitch, then scoot your chair up nice & close and get a 2560x1600 27" monitor (be aware that at 2560x1600 you're going to lose quite a few frames per second, and run hotter GPU temps, 2560 resolution is literally twice as many pixels for the graphics card to deal with)
The 5000's picture works best if you turn the tv's sharpness down to 0. Think of it as monitor based anti-aliasing. It's not blurry at 0 sharpness, it just takes the edge off the pixels a bit. Actually, for gaming, zero sharpness looks like a 2x antialiasing, without any hardware strain or frames per second sacrifice. I'm sitting about 2/3 meter from the screen now (about 2 feet) and I can see individual pixels in the smiley faces on this page (like this one
), while this one
looks completely smooth, and most others are in-between. The text looks pretty good, think i have text smoothing turned on though. I need to rearrange my desk so that I can type and get my face another foot away, if i want everything to look smooth.
Brightness, tv's are generally brighter than monitors, being designed for further viewing distances. Out of the box the tv was Bright! I spent about an hour tinkering with the tv's setttings to get the brightness down, without losing detail in the shadows, and yet keeping the blacks truly black. It only took that long because the tv has a LOT of settings to tinker with. there are 2 sliders which increase the blackness of blacks, one setting for the backlight brightness, a 'brightness' slider which works on the lcd end of letting light through, a gama slider which affects how it processes light for display, and at least 3 different contrast sliders which work slightly differently. Personally I like the array of options, but it might be daunting for some. Eventually I got the screen dimmed down for up close use, while keeping the blacks black, without loss of detail in the shadows, and keeping the light areas popping nicely. I'll tinker with it more in the future no doubt, to perfect it. I ended up with backlight brightness at 6 out of 20, which as a side benefit should mean low power consumption and long LED life. pixel density aside (not an issue if you are the proper distance from the screen) the screen's picture looks MUCH better than my old 27" TN monitor.
I believe both the 5000 and the 5300 have the same screen, the differences are in the other hardware built into the tv. So for our purposes, the 5000 is just cheaper. I'd only get the 5300 if you are interested in the TV capabilities it has.
The response time is a little bit slower than a TN monitor. I think the samsung 27" monitor i was looking at had a response of just 2ms. The tv doesn't list a response time in specs. But it does brag about it's response time being fast for fast paced action movies, etc. and I know it has a processor upgrade from samsung's previous generation of led tvs. Here's the thing about response times though... my 27" monitor had a response of like 18ms, and that was considered 'fast' when that monitor was new. Back then a slower monitor could have up to 40-50ms response (and that actually could be noticeable). Now people act like 8ms is huge lag... it's not. Some televisions are 'laggy' compared to monitors, but pretty much all faster tv's (these 5000 series samsung seem plenty fast), and pretty much all modern monitors, are "fast". When it comes to screen response time, I really think that some gamers turn into a princess who's looking for a pea nine matresses below them. 2ms? 8ms? 12ms? I seriously doubt the human eye can even detect differences below 0.01 seconds (10ms). I mean lets be realistic, most multiplayer games will have 30-150 ms lag just due to the internet. As long as you don't have screen lag like a 12 year old laptop...
I'm using a DVI-to-HDMI cable on my GTX 470, it seems to work fine. I'm not sure if there would be any advantage to using the hdmi port on the graphics card. I'd just go with whatever cable you had handy. I suppose i could dig up an extra hdmi cable and try it, but I don't except there to be any noticeable differences. I imagine if you used the hdmi port on the graphics card, you might get sound in the tv? in the dvi-hdmi arrangement i have set up there is no tv sound (which i prefer, since i have nice speakers/headphones plugged into the computer). It also might make a difference if you're trying to play blu ray movies on your computer? I'm really not sure. blu ray's have a lot of HDMI DRM crap that makes playing them on a computer a messy situation.
one oddity of the 5000 model I have though, there's no volume control on the tv itself. It has a graphic equalizer even, but no volume in the menu's. Only the remote has vol+/-. Mine's mute because it's signal is sound-free, but I'll have to make sure I don't lose the remote if I ever want to use it as a tv.
(eventually I think we'll all have "4K" resolution, 3840x2160 or "2160p", and we'll be able to sit nose-to-nose with a to a 50" screen. but those run 15 grand right now, and would melt the current crop of graphics cards)
/www.amazon.com/Samsung-UN32EH5000-32-Inch-1080p-Black/dp/B0071O4ETQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1360452732&sr=1-1&keywords=1080p
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