My absolute best indoor training purchase has been a trainer desk. That allows me to park my laptop right in front of my handlebars at the perfect height so I don’t have to bend my neck.
Honestly, I don’t see a huge difference between a smaller laptop screen close to you versus a 40+ inch screen five feet away from you.
Well, sure… if you use extremes in distance as your examples.
But as I shared above, my 40" screen is a minimal 2-ish feet from my head, so the effective Field of View (FOV) is quite large.
Screen size at a given distance is what matters, and even large screens can be placed close to enhance immersion, particularly for POV style riding (1st person in Zwift and similar apps) to feel more “in the world”. Same stuff I worked on for ages with sim auto racing and applied here.
I’ve had mostly a 24" (1080p TV), then a 27" (1080p) monitor, then 27" 4k monitor, and finally I was given a 32" TV. I thought it was 720p, but actually might be 1080p too.
If I were buying new (all the TV’s and monitors I’ve used to date have been ones we’ve had surplus and sitting around), I would be in that 40-46" region, and 4k. My current setup is tight front to back, and I can’t get any further back from the TV.
I am surprised by how many show/run TR on larger screens. I use a cheap phone mount on my stem to show and run TR and then have a 42" tv that I use for entertainment.
I sure don’t run TR on max size on the big screen. TR runs in the minimal bar setting at the bottom, with Zwift or a streaming movies/series on the main screen.
Not to mention there is a massive difference in trying to read the smaller fonts (leaderboards, etc) on a small screen that is close to you vs. a larger screen that is farther away.
Smaller screen small font is all but illegible to my eyes, but I can see it just fine on a 32" screen that is ~3 feet away from me.
Yeah, that is where resolution (and sort of “effective resolution”) also plays into legibility… for aging eyes like ours at least
Even with my large screen and close distance, I think some of the Zwift text sizes are on the small size at time.
That is what I see in most of the pics above. Your setup actually seems to be more of the exception. Your big screen looks a bit high up to me like you have to crane your neck a little and look up.
Anyway, it’s all good. To each his own!
My trainer desk moves between rollers and trainer so if I installed a TV, it would either be off center or I’d need two. When I think about wall mounting a tv, the electricity, the cabling, I like the simplicity of parking my laptop on the trainer desk and going.
Very likely, as I have seen setups that I would not run myself posted aplenty. I probably consider ergonomics and FOV more than most, due to my sim racing background.
Nah, same angle as outside. Center of screen is like looking down the road around shoulder height of a rider ahead. Not a single issue with neck strain even on 4 hour rides.
When I first considered watching tv I thought about a projector and bought a reasonably priced one from Amazon.
I found the best place for resolution was behind me and that brought my shadow in as a problem.
I gave up on the projector and found a cheap tv on eBay. I figured I didn’t need the latest model of tv if I was just going to be using it asa cycling tv. I did make sure I could fit a headphone cable (although to save my hearing as much as possible I turn the subtitles on)