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It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

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Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#91

Post by helloworld11 »

I'm a bit hazy on this and how a smart TV interacts with the rest of the devices in a home, but for example, I have a 55 inch 4K Samsung TV in my living room, which I barely use. Occasionally I stream a movie on it, use it for music when friends visit and sometimes hook it to my laptop as a large monitor through HDMI but that's it. About 80% of the time it sits unused. With all that in mind, I don't see how all of its internal spying and tracking software is even important. How much information could it possibly collect if what it gets is nothing more than sporadic generic movie/music viewing?

I don't see the problem with this particular technology if it's used lightly, unlike a smart phone, for example, which can pass enormous amounts of personal and location information on you even if you're not addicted to using it all day.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#92

Post by schwartzworld »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #68
Gigachad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are out of touch with the average consumer. They absolutely love smart TVs and would consider a TV without apps and streaming to be broken. In fact, even the ideal HN approved setup is just a smart TV where the online bit is a removable stick on the back. The average consumer just doesn’t care about being able to swap it out.

But consumers would buy dumb TVs with dongles if that’s what they made. We used to buy digital set top boxes. Antennas. VCRs. DVD players. Manufacturers definitely jumped on the chance to add software and an internet connection to TVs. Why sell a product once, when you can do that and then sell your customers to ad agencies?

In the days of VCRs, they sold tvs with those built in too! An obvious convenience until the VCR part broke, which anything with mechanical components will eventually.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#94

Post by maccard »

bojangleslover wrote: post #32
cookie_monsta wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA: > I’m usually told something akin to: “well, just don’t connect the TV to the Internet!” But that route locks you out of firmware updates, and some TV makers remove functionality if you refuse to participate in their online ecosystem. Many smart TV GUIs also need to load before you’re even allowed to switch laggy HDMI inputs. (although this is exactly what I did with the Samsung smart TV I picked up on a bargain…

Who needs firmware updates on a TV?

TVs are more than just displays, and software has bugs. As an example, my last TV had numerous issues with CEC and HDCP [0]. this was _eventually_ resolved by a firmware update from Sony.

[0] https://www.sony.com/electronics/support/articles/00173195

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#95

Post by nicolas_t »

Typical recommendation I always give to anyone looking for a dumb tv, get a JVC videoprojector, it's dumb and you'll get the biggest price to size to quality ratio possible for watching movies (note: the actual price is far below msrp if you look).

Buying a B-stock JVC DLA-X790R for 2,300 usd was one of the best purchase I've ever made. Amazing image quality, looks great on the 120 inch screen that drops from my ceiling in the living room and not a iota of smartness included.

Only thing is that it does mean that watching movies during the day is not great without black out curtains. This creates intentionality behind our tv watching. Turning on the video projector, closing the black out curtains and opening the screen means that we don't start watching tv out of force of habit. There's a certain degree of conscious decision behind watching a movie or tv show and I think that's beneficial to us by reducing the amount of tv watching and forcing us to concentrate on higher quality content.

It's a bit similar to using records to listen to music (I don't personally but I can see how it could enhance the experience compared to just turning on spotify) or to making loose leafed tea with proper teaware.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#96

Post by pomian »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #42

That's why I'm not replacing my 10 years old panel, which is HD only (1080p) but has no connection abilities other than the ethernet port. When it'll be too old to work, I'll replace it with a projector.

Going to be the same solution with cars.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#97

Post by phh »

zasdffaa wrote: post #65

A serious, non-trolling question to all. I've not had a TV for decades and for me that's a good thing. I've watched TVs in pubs (I'm in the uk) and round my mates' houses so it's not become some strange alien thing, and I'm still happy to be without it (that is, on balance; there are good things about broadcast TV and some bad, and the latter outweighs the former for me). In your opinion, is there actual overall valu…

From your message, it sounds like you think TVs are used only to watch live broadcast channels.

If that's the case, that's the part you missed, nowadays I think that we're at like 60-70% of usage that IS NOT live broadcast channels.

I do think there is a bit to be missed by not watching live broadcast channels, because it is an easy window to view how a large part of the population think, but yeah overall the content is pretty abysmal.

But, WRT having a physical TV, it's mostly comfort. I want to watch my entertainment (educative youtube video, dumb shut-your-brain-off TV shows, "complex" plot with pretty images TV shows) from the comfort of my sofa, with "happier" colors and brightness (I could say better "picture quality", but since it's mostly post-production changes, it's usually hardly representative of real-life, it's only representative of what the producer wants)

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#98

Post by momenti »

atVelocet wrote: post #23

Just search for the professional line of monitors every major brand sells. Those are made for ads, conventions, etc and most of the time lack any smart features but have the same displays as their „smart“ counterparts. Only downside: You pay more (>$/€1000) to have less.

Do you really pay for less? Digital signage displays often run 24/7 in temper proof cases with relatively poor ventilation and heat dissipation. Thus you might actually get a display that lasts longer (which, AFAIK, mostly comes down to higher quality capacitors and capacitors placed where they do not overheat, e.g. not directly next to high current transistors and resistors, which is common planned obsolesce practice in consumer TVs).

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#99

Post by forgotpwd16 »

mrjin wrote: post #41

Smart TVs were created for all kinds of agendas but none were actually for us the consumers. All those agendas require an OS which takes time to boot. Making it worse, some of those TVs' CPU are crap and thus every operation takes much longer than those dumb ones. Lots of vendors also start to ship new remotes that removed all the essential buttons, especially the video source button, and I have to press 5 or more ti…

>we are actually paying more(of course, lots extra hardware cost) for less

Pretty sure 10 years ago I couldn't buy a 55-inch 4K 120Hz TV for $300. So depends on what you mean "less" as hardware-wise it's certainly the opposite.

Re: It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV

#100

Post by dmitriid »

zasdffaa wrote: post #65

A serious, non-trolling question to all. I've not had a TV for decades and for me that's a good thing. I've watched TVs in pubs (I'm in the uk) and round my mates' houses so it's not become some strange alien thing, and I'm still happy to be without it (that is, on balance; there are good things about broadcast TV and some bad, and the latter outweighs the former for me). In your opinion, is there actual overall valu…

- Watching movies/shows on a big screen

- Playing console games

- Common "sharing ground" when friends are around (let me add something to Spotify queue, let me show something on Youtube etc.)

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