HOW TO… Use your computer on your TV

What you need: TV set; desktop PC or laptop; various accessories Time required: 30 minutes

The biggest screen in your home almost certainly isn’t on your PC or laptop. It’s sitting in your lounge – or possibly the kitchen or bedroom – and you use it to watch films and TV.

Compared with a good desktop monitor, TVs are relatively cheap. That’s because while the surface area is larger, they have a lower resolution, as you’ll spot when you get up close to switch one off. While it’s impossible to see individual pixels on a modern laptop screen or desktop PC monitor, the pixels on even a high-resolution TV are much more visible.

TV manufacturers can get away with comparatively lower resolutions for the same reason that companies who create billboard posters can: as our distance from the object we’re viewing increases, our ability to separate its components – the printed dots or displayed pixels – reduces.

In case you were wondering, 300 dots per inch, both vertically and horizontally, is generally considered an appropriate print resolution for anything that’s going to be read