It’s Still Stupidly, Difficult to Buy a ‘Dumb’ TV • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by navjack27 » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:15 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #188

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…

I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. My TCL Roku TV is great and I will be buying another soon. It does everything I want and none of the things I don’t. It’s easy to use for me and for my kids. Roku also has all the major streaming services that I want. And I haven’t seen a commercial in 10 years. What am I missing?

That's my experience with my TCL also. When I get up in the morning I just turn on the Roku TV app on my phone, Go to the remote, turn on the TV, hit right once, then hit okay. Then it's on HDMI 1 and it's displaying my Mac Mini all day. This is a dumb TV. Doesn't do anything except what I tell it to and it just shows what I want.

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

#332

Post by navjack27 » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:17 PM UTC

mchristen wrote: post #195

IgorPartola wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don’t know what you are talking about. My TCL Roku TV is great and I will be buying another soon. It does everything I want and none of the things I don’t. It’s easy to use for me and for my kids. Roku also has all the major streaming services that I want. And I haven’t seen a commercial in 10 years. What am I missing?

I also own a TCL Roku TV and the interface is easily twice as slow as my Roku Ultra. Right on the home screen is a giant ad(unless you have network adblocking). Over the years Roku and Google have been fighting about Youtube/Youtube TV on Roku, just like Disney/ESPN fought the cable companies. I also own a Toshiba built FireTV that suffers from those same problems but far worse. Way more ads, much slower interface, a…

Don't use the interface? Use it as a dumb monitor right?

I'll go as far as to say that you can't complain about a slow interface of a cheap smart TV if you went out to buy it with the purpose of using it just as a monitor which is what you really should be doing. The smart isn't a value add except for being able to use a remote app on your phone especially if you're a HN frequenter. You gotta have computers lying around that can replace all the "smart".

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

#333

Post by baq » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

everyone wrote: post #129

TACD wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what we did. Our ‘television’ was never hooked up to actually receive broadcast signal, we’ve always just used it as a big screen for the media/gaming PC set up in the lounge, and at some point I realised if I’m going to spend my evenings staring at Good Screen I might as well upgrade from this 40” 1080p TV with a dead pixel row. So I looked around and eventually bought a Philips 559M1 55” monitor ins…

Afaik the difference between whats called a "monitor" and whats called a "TV" nowadays is that.. TV's show a compressed or upscaled image. TV's have much higher latency. And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.

Most TVs nowadays have a 'Game' input setting which disables most latency-impacting post-processing. Always check before buying, though.

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

#334

Post by GuB-42 » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:22 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #240

GuB-42 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we are actually paying more We are actually paying less, because all these sponsors and ads pay the manufacturer, which in turn lowers the purchase price. So if you don't use the smart features, it is actually a good deal, and if you do, well it is still a good deal. The one who pay for your discount are those who pay for the advertised services (ex: Netflix) without buying the TV. Probably the best thing to do…

If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream. There’s no upside for them to do so. Even if they sell a third fewer models, the ad revenue way more than makes up for it, and it’s recurring revenue to boot.

> If triple A gaming has taught me anything, no, the prices are not lowered in compensation for the additional revenue stream.

Inflation-adjusted, on average, AAA games have slowly decreased in retail price over the years. At the same time, they have become much more expensive to produce. Technology have improved, HD graphics, storage and computing power is now cheap, but creative work is as expensive as ever, if not more. And someone has to make all these assets and feature-film level animation that newer hardware supports and that players now expect from AAA games.

That increase in production costs compared to a relative decrease in retail prices explain a lot of things regarding the AAA game industry: in-game purchases, a general lack of originality (originality is a gamble, and with $100M+ games, investors want guaranteed returns), few consoles exclusives (producers want the largest market possible), lower pay than in other industries,...

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

#335

Post by tzs » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #126

lotsofpulp wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does explain why smart TVs would be easy to buy and dumb TVs difficult to buy. For example, I do not care if a TV is smart or dumb. All I care is how quickly it turns on because I am connecting it to an Apple TV anyway. Even as a person who would rather have a dumb TV than a smart TV, my actions continue to support smart TV manufacturers because I am not willing to spend the time and effort required to seek out du…

But if there are no dumb TVs for sale, how do you know if that's the consumer's desire or not? The much simpler explanation is that TVs plastered with ads and surveillance are more profitable to companies.

Smart TVs pretty much completely displaced dumb TVs in the consumer market long before it occurred to anyone to use them for ads or surveillance.

The correct explanation is probably that since modern TVs are inherently digital devices the most sensible way to implement them is as computers running TV software, and once you are building your TV that way the only difference between a dumb TV and a smart TV is the software.

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

#336

Post by LeonidasXIV » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

woldenron wrote: post #235

andix wrote: post #37

TVs without a tuner are quite popular in Austria. You save around 30€ per month on payments to public TV stations, if your TV is just a monitor and has no tuner. You can get for example one of those (german, but you probably can read the specs anyway): https://nogis.at or https://www.gisbefreit.at/ Most devices are not high end though.

Do you perhaps know how does it work in Germany? I heard you have to pay the TV tax regardless if you have a TV or not.

Yes, you have to pay the Rundfunkgebühr also if you don't have a TV but your computer has access to the Internet because public broadcasters also have a presence on the Internet.

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

#337

Post by baq » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:29 PM UTC

devin wrote: post #112

csa wrote: post #103

For a tech periodical, this seems to be a stretch for content. Thirty seconds poking around the interwebs led me to this Samsung 65” 4K “digital signage” for $1125: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/displays/4k-uhd/qb-serie... 43, 50, 55, 75, and 85 also available. I assume that these are as good as or better than most people have in their homes (esp. with Vizio), but probably not as good as what home theater enthu…

I don’t know the answer but wonder if “digital signage” means it is more often viewed at a distance, and thus has lower quality control around say, dead pixels. Just a guess, but it seems like that could be true.

No, it means exactly the opposite - they're supposed to be sitting in a commercial setting and take more abuse; displaying the same content 24/7 in an unfriendly environment (hotter/colder than your usual living room). They also have features like RS232 connectivity for remote control of a whole fleet of TVs from a single point.

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

#338

Post by kkfx » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:29 PM UTC

Things changes: in the past the TV was a means of mass communication with both trash and valuable contents, nowadays that's only trash, at least in my current (France) and home (Italy) countries, so the fact all TV are "smart" (or, their buyer are considered dumb by the "smart" device OEM) it's just part of a Darwinian evolutionary process: a small help to push certain cohort of users out of TVs for the sake of humanity...

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

#339

Post by daveoc64 » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

marcodiego wrote: post #320

It will be a hard fight to fight. Soon TV's will come with built in 5G, you won't even need to setup its wifi. It will be a difficult to win battle.

Do you honestly believe that?

The TV manufacturers will subsidise a cellular connection to allow users to stream hours of 4K content in exchange for a few pennies of ad revenue?

Smart TVs don't make any sense unless they are connected to a home network.

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

#340

Post by mrandish » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 3:33 PM UTC

I haven't bought a new TV in a while since I use a video projector in my home theater. Last year I got a vacation place and bought a new higher-end Samsung TV. The place is semi-off-grid and only has connectivity through a 4G mobile hotspot (c'mon Elon hurry up with my Starlink!).

However, the day I unboxed the TV there was no internet yet. I only got it out with the goal of testing the new receiver and 5.1 speakers that had just arrived. All I needed was to display the HDMI UI output of the receiver so I could select the proper speaker assignments and validate the speakers were working before mounting them. I could NOT figure out how to get this display to... you know, display! At least not without first providing it an internet connection and spending nearly half an hour configuring it.

The first barrier was accepting the license agreement. But before displaying the license agreement the TV insisted on checking a server to see if there was a newer version of the license agreement. I couldn't figure out any way around this and it's just unacceptable.