The last time I'd gone looking for an exact 720p monitor was about a year ago. I just looked again now after posting this and pulled the trigger on a used Gateway 1775W for like 50 bucks. The owner's manual seems to specify that the "optimal resolution" for the monitor is exactly 1280 x 720 so I'm hopeful this means it really is exactly 1280 by 720 pixels. I'm sure it's going to be a semi-garbage TN panel but there's always tradeoffs to be made. I have plenty of nice IPS, VA, DMD displays for when I want to get picky about colors and viewing angles. It also seems there are some 8 inch displays intended for security camera use at a reasonably price point, but I have not had good luck with that particular brand and 8 inches is really too small anyways. Anyways so I'll update you lads with my impressions when it gets here.
>1440p or 2160p
I did think about this, but the main issue is I don't think any tv or monitors actually support integer scaling by default (scaling on the monitor side). It would be nice if monitors start paying attention to this at some point. Integer scaling is mostly demanded by gamers whereas blurry """4k upscaling""" is seen as superior by dumb sportsball and capeshit boomers who find "pixelation" to be a bad thing. I've heard vague rumbles from NVidia about "large format gaming displays" or whatever so it's possible that somewhere down the pipe there will be good options for integer/box-fill scaling.
>scaler boxes
typically add an extra frame of lag on their own. At least that's what my framemeister does. I find the extra frame of lag worthwhile to sidestep the awful adc and built-in scaling of most analog inputs on digital tvs, but it just feels wasteful to add lag for a digital-digital conversion step. Also I am pretty sure the framemeister I have tops out at 1080p output anyways. In the future I expect someone will produce a fancy FPGA box that can do it all lagless, like some future version of the OSSC. Something to watch for the future, to be sure.
Other things: The Xbox 360 has an option for outputting 1366x768 exactly, making it better than the PS3 for this. I have a hacked PS3 but haven't got around to getting one of those xkey360 devices for the xbox, so for now I have way more games on my PS3. The nintendo NES Mini and SNES Mini both max out at 720p output, no 1080. The PS Vita TV thing only offers 720p output I'm pretty sure, but it's fucked anyways since internally it runs at 544p and upscales to 720p so no matter what you're hitting plebscale.
For the longest time I couldn't figure out why every tv was 1366x768 resolution when the common content was all 1280x720. Then one day while messing with Windows XP?/7? I think I figured it out. PC CRT common resolutions after DOS era were 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768. I think it was Windows 7 that treated 1024x768 as it's standard resolution. it would complain with an warning message if you set a resolution with less than 768 vertical lines. So this became the de-facto standard for various corporate Dell standard secretary monitors or whatever and 1366 is the ~16:9 version of a 768 vertical line monitor. then it's just economies of scale if you can use the same panel fab that everybody else is using and they all churn out cheapshit 1366x768 monitors so path dependence took over.
So that's my blogpost. The End. (for now)