Having just bought a new TV I thought I'd try my old (10 years) 32" as a monitor. The results however, are not great. I've tried changing some settings in CCC and improved things a bit, but text in particular isn't great. Are there any must do's when using a TV.
As its 10 years old the resolution is going to be pretty low I imagine. Perhaps 720p at best, whats the make and model number of the TV? Are you using HDMI to connect?
Also remember that you tend to sit much closer to your monitor than you normally do to a TV. The dot pitch tends to be greater on a TV than it does on a monitor, mainly because it doesn't matter so much when you sit 10ft away from a TV. This does mean that the picture tends to look more fuzzy on a TV than on a proper monitor. The main downside is that you'll never get a great desktop image on a TV, especially if you sit 18" away from it
I've got a 1080i 40" Sony Bravia from years ago that I occasionally use with my PC for watching TV in bed. However, for gaming, just forget it. At 1920x1080, the quality is awful and it needs to be dropped down to 720 to make it anywhere near acceptable.
It's a Phillips 32PF7531D/10 Aspect ratio 16:9 Brightness 500 cd/m² Contrast ratio (typical) 800:1 Diagonal screen size (inch) 32 inch Diagonal screen size (metric) 80 cm Picture enhancement Pixel Plus Contrast Plus Progressive Scan 3D Combfilter 3/2 - 2/2 motion pull down Digital Noise Reduction Jagged Line Suppression Luminance Transient Improver Pulse Killer Chip Active Control Colour Temperature Adjustment Sharpness Adjustment Screen enhancement Anti-Reflection coated screen Panel resolution 1366 x 768p Response time (typical) 8 ms Dynamic screen contrast 3200:1 Viewing angle 176º (H) / 176º (V) Display screen type LCD WXGA Active Matrix TFT Computer formats 640 x 480, 60, 67, 72, 75Hz 800 x 600, 56, 60, 72, 75Hz 1024 x 768, 60, 70, 75Hz 720 x 400, 70Hz Video Formats 640 x 480i - 1Fh 640 x 480p - 2Fh 720 x 576i - 1Fh 720 x 576p - 2Fh 1280 x 720p - 3Fh 1920 x 1080i - 2Fh
32" at 1366 x 768 is your key problem. However even modern TVs still don't tend to make very good monitors. If you can it might be worth using the TV as a second display for media if you want/need the extra screen size, but I definitely wouldn't try to use it as a primary display if you have any other options available to you.
TV is not great for monitor but I have used them in the past for movie playback & things to much lag for gaming
As others have stated TVs suffer from rubbish resolutions, less than ideal colour repro in some cases and so on... TL-DR: You can, but I wouldn't... Certainly wouldn't on a TV that size/resolution...