Whew. For a minute there I was going to cal l someone and ask, but then I realized that if I am a figment of imagination, any response I received would also be a figment and therefore be totally unreliable. Wait.. Maybe this conversation is a figment of imagination. Oh no.. Am I real? Do I even exist?

PC may not be the master race ,but console peasants are still a joke :P

Hahaha

PC perception for the average every day Joe household is that they are "too expensive".

The Witcher likes PCs. That's all that matters. It proves everything about the average people who get consoles.

Now that you mention it, I recall I DID use to have a box to connect my PSX console to my VGA monitor (which I normally used for playing PC games of course).

But I had a very good reason: I had bought the PSX secretly without my ex-girlfriend finding about it, so I wanted to keep it a secret which made it impossible to connect it to our living room TV. I just needed to have it for Gran Turismo and some other PSX exclusives that I wanted to try out.

"Why would you need to hide it from your gf blaa blaa blaa"; because we were kinda short on money at that point of time, so me using money on a new toy wouldn't have sit well on her. But I guess she found out about it later anyway, maybe that is why she is an ex.

Ok I could think of another valid reason: rest of the family using the living room TV, so basically the only way to play your console is to connect it to your monitor. Unless you have a TV of your own in your bedroom, but that is actually quite rare here. I guess in America every room has its own TV, here it is normally just one TV for the whole family; after all there is usually just one TV socket in the whole household, and that is in the living room. Cultural differences and all that.

Nowadays there seems to be less difference between monitors and TVs, TVs are basically bigger monitors with an additional TV receiver. I guess TVs and monitors tend to use different display technologies, but at least I don't have a problem using our TV even for work every now and then (laptop connected to it).

If and when I buy a 65" (or bigger) TV to replace our current 47" TV, it may well be I will just move the 47" TV to my "work room" and use it as a big-ass second (gaming) monitor there.

Nah. That's where the Switch comes into play. ;)

So do you have several TVs in households there in the US?

This just occurred to me when I watched the Poltergeist (2015) movie yesterday from TV. The movie family had at least three TVs that I counted, one big in the living room (through which the youngest daughter talked with the ghosts), one in the parents' bedroom, and one in the oldest daughter's bedroom. Do you really tend to have TV sockets in every bedroom, or how does that work?

Uh, nope. The Nintendo Switch is the other screen. ;) That's one of the selling points of the system that you can play it docked and connected to a monitor/TV or undocked as a handheld with absolutely no real interruption of gameplay. So if anybody else wants to use the tellie one simply takes the system with them to keep playing.

Yes yes, sorry I changed the subject but I was genuinely interested in the US TV policy in families, since I noticed you are from US.

As said, here families normally have just one TV (in the living room), and that's it.

Interestingly enough, I grew up in Germany and our family was a bit unusual since we had three TVs: the family/living room TV, and one each for myself and for my brother in our respective rooms.

Funnily enough, these days I don't own a single TV - not for well over a decade now - as my PC is my main entertainment station for music, shows/films, and games.

Consoles have come ahead in a number of way the PC didn't and the PC has regressed.

Light guns were a main part of consoles. The Wii had it's motion tracking and foot board. The PS3 had Move and the Xbox had Kinect but those had privacy issues. It wouldn't surprise me if it was consoles that pulled ahead with Virtual Reality.


By TV socket do you mean the aerial? Most other countries TVs one each instead of being connected to one aerial stuck on the house unless it's satellite dish or cable TV.

I was really into movies for a while there and got a nice 4k set, but the problem with using it as a big monitor is the input lag. Even in "game mode" it's generally much worse than a PC monitor, which is especially obvious in games with mouse look in my experience. Sometimes though when I'm playing something like Assassin's Creed I'll hook the PC up to the TV and use a controller.

No I just mean the TV socket on the wall to which you connect your TV (receiver) with an antenna wire. The signal to that socket can come either from aerial antenna, cable or a satellite dish.

Do you mean to say it is still normal in e.g. UK for TVs each have their own small antenna? I guess that can still be done but quite often the signal may be quite weak, and can you get e.g. HD channels at all with such small antennas?

Yeah I think here it is much more common to get the TV feed from the socket on the wall, not using separate small antennas for each TV. I live in an apartment house and I get cable TV, my friend lives in his own house and gets aerial from the big roof antenna.

Then again it seems we are more and more moving into people watching their programs from the internet, at which point those TV sockets or separate antennas become irrelevant. I see even my wife doing that all the time, she watches some videos even from her mobile phone, rather than watching TV.

Hence, the difference between a "computer monitor" (or tablet screen or whatever) and a "TV" is blurring even more. As said, I am considering my aging 47" TV as a big ass monitor that is normally used for watching TV programs, but can be used for anything else as well.