I recently found myself working from home, and needing a lot more pixels. I have been using a 40" Sony 3DTV as a monitor (sadly it won't take 120Hz input) and it's only 1080p, which is fine for gaming or doing one thing at a time, but no good for having four windows open and having to be able to make sense of them all at once. It's true that using a television as a monitor typically gives a fairly low-fi experience, but I go back to way back and spent many of my late formative years using Amigas with a TV as a monitor, so I have a fairly high tolerance for visual blemishes.
It costs me about ten dollars in fuel every day to drive to and from work, so over the month I expect to spend teleworking that more or less covers my choice, a LG 43UT80 which I got from Costco. They seem to be the only ones carrying it any more besides second hand sales and open boxes, and many of the reviews have unkind things to say about the quality, but it's got a three year warranty on top of a ninety day return policy. If it winds up living up to the worst reviews, at least it will probably do it while I can get my money back.
I've been looking for an excuse to go 4k for a long time, and this was the cheapest model I could find that didn't seem to be complete trash. It has badly uneven gray and blue regularity for some reason, but weirdly has great black and decent white despite this. It doesn't have much brightness, but I usually don't light the room I work in that much so it's a good fit. The settings are a bit terrible out of the box, but I got some help from rtings. The very first thing you should do after connecting the TV and getting a picture from your system on it (which is all done very normally) is to hit the Settings (Gear) button and select the Expert Dark Space picture mode, then select Advanced Settings, but then before you mess around in there hit the back button. You'll be looking at the Picture menu, and from here you can go into the Aspect Ratio menu and turn on the "Just Scan" option. This puts pixels on the screen 1:1. After that you can mess around with all the settings found in the link above.
When I connect this TV to Windows 10, it is fairly well-behaved. DPI seems to work generally correctly even though the television shows up as a 72" model based on the reported size. I don't know why the results are so different on Linux but it's a bit irritating here. However, it's not all that difficult to fix once you know which tools to use. I had everything I needed installed already, because I fiddled with EDIDs when I started using the Sony TV.
I run Devuan Linux 5 on a frankenputer with an Nvidia 4060 Ti 16GB. I got the EDID from the nvidia-settings program. Just click on the monitor (Mine is connected to the HDMI-1 connector, and shows up on the left under GPU 0) and you'll see the "Acquire EDID..." button in the lower right corner. Save this and you can use e.g. "parse-edid < edid.bin | tee monitor.txt"
$ parse-edid < edid.bin
Checksum Correct
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "LG TV SSCR2"
ModelName "LG TV SSCR2"
VendorName "GSM"
# Monitor Manufactured week 1 of 2024
# EDID version 1.3
# Digital Display
DisplaySize 1600 900
And so on, and so forth. I changed the Identifier to "Monitor0", cut out Modelines "Mode 0" and "Mode 1", and then edited the DisplaySize. Long story short, I went to the first screen size calculator I found with google and put in 42.5 inches diagonal with 16:9 ratio, and asked for millimeters, then put in those numbers ("941 529"). I also changed the ModelName to "LG 43UT80". I tried it with the Gamma specified (as 2.2), and even though the Gamma actually is set to 2.2 in the EDID and that's what I have it set to on the TV and that works fine, setting it here also made the color too bright and washed out, so I removed that line as well.
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
ModelName "LG TV 43UT80"
VendorName "LG"
DisplaySize 941 529
#Gamma 2.20
Option "DPMS" "false"
Horizsync 30-183
VertRefresh 24-120
# Maximum pixel clock is 600MHz
Modeline "Mode 2" 148.500 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 3" 148.500 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 4" 74.250 1280 1390 1420 1650 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 5" 74.250 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 6" 74.250 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1082 1087 1125 +hsync +vsync interlace
Modeline "Mode 7" 74.250 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1082 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync interlace
Modeline "Mode 8" 27.027 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync
Modeline "Mode 9" 27.027 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 -hsync -vsync
Modeline "Mode 10" 27.000 720 732 796 864 576 581 586 625 -hsync -vsync
Modeline "Mode 11" 74.250 1920 2558 2602 2750 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 12" 74.250 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 13" 74.250 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 +hsync +vsync
Modeline "Mode 14" 27.000 1440 1464 1590 1728 576 578 581 625 -hsync -vsync interlace
Option "PreferredMode" "Mode 2"
EndSection
Despite this limited set of advertised modes, either the TV or the driver will also support all the usual modes you expect from a monitor, the BIOS screen and the boot messages all show up fine, and so on. But text was the wrong size even after I manually specified the DPI, so I decided to do an edited EDID. Debian provides wxedid, a graphic EDID editor that can easily do this job. Weirdly, it is not very well behaved and works a lot better before you fix the display size. Anyway, you run "wxedid edid.bin" and click on the "BDD: Basic Display Descriptor" in the left pane and there are the width and height of the display in cm, where it says it's 120x90 when it should be 94x53. That's the only change you have to make; save this as a new file (e.g. newedid.bin) and then copy it somewhere (perhaps /etc/X11) and then you can specify it in the xorg.conf.
This opens another small can of worms in itself. Another long story short, I looked in the /var/log/Xorg.log.0 file for "DFP" and found this:
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): Valid display device(s) on GPU-0 at PCI:7:0:0
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-0
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-1
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-2
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-3 (boot)
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-4
[ 2126.540] (--) NVIDIA(0): DFP-5
[...]
[ 2126.542] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): LG Electronics LG TV SSCR2 (DFP-3): connected
[ 2126.542] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): LG Electronics LG TV SSCR2 (DFP-3): Internal TMDS
[ 2126.542] (--) NVIDIA(GPU-0): LG Electronics LG TV SSCR2 (DFP-3): 600.0 MHz maximum pixel clock
This is important because it's how you specify which connector the display with the custom EDID is connected to in the Xorg.conf:
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Device0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-3:/etc/X11/edid.bin"
With all this done, you get consistent results from the display, fonts are the right size, and so on. This approach should work with basically any monitor. If you are not using the Nvidia binary driver, you can get the EDID from the get-edid command instead of from nvidia-settings, but making use of it is up to you.
What's this thing actually like to use as a monitor? In my experience, adequate for business and gaming. It would probably be pretty irritating to try to use it for video editing or art, because there is quite a bit of banding with greys and blues. Brightness is very consistent from just a few feet away (I'm at just over arm's reach, but I have long arms) except at the very edges, which I admit is a bit annoying. It has a good refresh rate so it's responsive when playing games, but of course it's only 60Hz and it also only does HDR10 and doesn't have enough brightness to really pop. It does have 4:4:4 color, and the color reproduction is very good if you put aside the banding, so overall it's amazingly tolerable.
I will also note that I have not connected this TV to any network, and I am really not interested in discovering what that is like, so I also can't tell you anything about that. I do not have an antenna (I could only maybe get a couple of stations here anyway) and have only viewed content from Windows 10 (from a laptop with Intel graphics) and my Linux system. I also have not played any audio through it whatsoever, and reviews say it sounds frankly terrible. This was just about getting the most bang for buck possible with decent reviews and a decent warranty. The menus are as slow as reported, but they are functional, and the remote is not too irritating despite the tendency for the scroll wheel/button to scroll when I'm trying to press it. I'm only a couple of days in here, so it remains to be seen whether this display even survives long enough to do much work.
Final note, the subpixel order is BGR (like a lot of TVs, including my Sony) so don't forget to configure the subpixel order in your settings so that fonts will render correctly. In XFCE4 it's in the Fonts tab of the Appearance settings; It's in similar locations in other desktop environments. I've just noticed that this now has Vertical RGB and Vertical BGR options, so if you were to rotate it left or right (which is probably a bad idea for thermal reasons) you could select one of those.