Funny this came up because I happened to be in walmart this morning and noticed that some of the lower end TV prices had come back down to what they were about this time last year. Many places Black friday deals were actually higher price than a month before then they never came back down.
If you are shopping for indoor training tvs now might be the time to buy instead of waiting for BF and they pull the same nonsense as last year.
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.
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.
Down & dirty FOV calcs for a 40" (diag) screen vs a 17" (diag) screen:
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.
Long ways back I had an old desktop with an old monitor and keyboard etc. What I liked about that was it was just there all the time ready to go. I didn’t have to go find anything wiggle the mouse and start pedaling and it just worked. For TR today that is likely overkill then and even now, but it did have its advantages.
2 things keep me from using my phone. First being ant+ only power meters on both my bikes so that would add a setup step to get going, right now my tiny ant+ dongle just lives in my lapotop. And also end up using my phone while on the trainer more often than I’d like. I have yet to find a reason I need a tablet so can’t justify buying one. So for me laptop, while not a large screen technically, makes more sense than phone.
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.
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.
Anyone using a projector?
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)
27 inch 144hz gaming monitor here - smooth as butter…
Yep, after my TV broke I went for a gaming monitor with native Nvidia g-sync - makes a huge difference to the smoothness on Zwift
