Fixing Hotel TV

Connecting a laptop to a Hotel TV can be a bad UX, why?

Published: Sunday, Jul 4, 2021 Last modified: Saturday, Mar 23, 2024

What’s wrong with this picture?

Hotel wifi
  1. It’s cropped aka overscanned
  2. Fonts rendering looks awful on the 1080p SMART TV

Fixing the crop

  1. Try reconnect port to PC/DVI port
  2. Disable overscan, however your TV Remote will probably not allow you to change this setting

Fixing the legibility of text on a TV

1080p TV displaying text outputed from Safari/M1
  1. Can you up the sharpness? Probably not.
  2. Pixel density probably prohibits fine text

TVs also tend to mess around with the colours / compression / scaling and ultimately it’s a huge chore to turn it off. Your hotel remote probably will not have the option even to change such settings!

Conclusion

There are some workarounds, but Hotel TVs probably won’t allow you to adjust these settings.

Don’t rely on a TV for doing any work.