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Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

nytimes.com

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Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#791

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

DominikPeters wrote: post #127
fideloper wrote: post #13

From a (cynical?) content and affiliate point of view, I like the style of taking user questions (bonus points if H.B. is a real person) and answering it - rather than just a bland list of products by "expensive but good, less expensive but less good" that wirecutter is. This lets the authors also recommend extra tangential items ("get a projector!"). On another note, my trust in these types of things have gone down…

I thought the answer was terrible. It’s wrong in saying you must buy a smart tv to get a reasonable display panel (this comment section does provide good non-smart options), condescending to the question, needlessly verbose (sounded like early versions of chatGPT to me tbh), and is uncritical in its assumption that opting out of data collection means that you won’t be tracked.

Agree. In my magazine editing days I’d have sent this back to the contributor for a rewrite. The premise of a technical agony aunt column should not be arguing with the reader and telling them “well actually, you do want this”.

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#792

Post by codetrotter »

prmoustache wrote: post #227
codetrotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but if everyone has WPA2 encryption enabled on their network, such as is the case in my neighbourhood, then there is no network for the TV to connect to anyways.

Couldn't a device looking for wifi just connect wherever you or your neighbours hit the wps button on their wifi router?

Don’t know. I never use the WPS button, nor have I ever seen anyone else use it either.

But I think you are right this could potentially let the device connect itself :(

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#794

Post by amelius »

tmm wrote: post #535
pupdogg wrote: post #133

I've designed and built many such TVs for the commercial/industrial vertical. I am currently working on developing such a TV for the consumer market and launching it under the name DUMBO.TV Let me know your thoughts. Reference pix of 70" industrial display using Samsung LCD panel and in-house LCD controller with physical OSD menu buttons along with IR/RS232 control capability: https://imgur.com/a/k6zrH3s

That would be great. My main issue with smart TVs isn't the network connectivity, its their horrible UI. The menus are universally confusing, slow and poorly thought-out. And because these TVs have to have some complicated OS to run all this stuff, they're slow to start up. My AppleTV goes from standby to on faster than my circa 2008[1] (only kinda smart) TV and receiver are ready to display an image. The AppleTV sho…

I'm still looking for a monitor that can switch between inputs within 50ms. Should be possible, no?

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#795

Post by flangola7 »

syntheticnature wrote: post #123
flangola7 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why. HDMI is a video transmission format.

To reduce the number of cables, in theory, though as noted it's not really implemented.

But why would I ever need to connect Ethernet to a display that already has a video cable?

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#796

Post by ElFitz »

bspammer wrote: post #779
ornornor wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because end user questions disrupt developer discussion this thread will be removed soon. Lol. I’ve worked for Samsung’s TV (and ad business, I’m ashamed to say) and this doesn’t surprise me one bit. The culture was actively user hostile and gave zero fucks about security or quality. All that mattered was how much data we could suck out of the users home. That included automated content recognition so we’d know wha…

The automated content recognition thing is surprising, at least to me. That’s so invasive I’d assume it was illegal, but I guess I’m too optimistic about privacy laws.

It’s been documented

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/smarter-living/how-to-sto...

They also unilaterally decided to add a new "ad" feature to existing TVs

https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/samsung-ads-debuts-thre...

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#797

Post by GrumpyNl »

pupdogg wrote: post #133

I've designed and built many such TVs for the commercial/industrial vertical. I am currently working on developing such a TV for the consumer market and launching it under the name DUMBO.TV Let me know your thoughts. Reference pix of 70" industrial display using Samsung LCD panel and in-house LCD controller with physical OSD menu buttons along with IR/RS232 control capability: https://imgur.com/a/k6zrH3s

Copy right problems, call it justa.tv

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#798

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

klausa wrote: post #488

The thing missing from this discussion is always that modern TV's _need_ powerful SoCs to look good. They have not been a "just take a signal from this input and display it" kinda devices for a long time, and _definitely_ after HDR became a thing. Your TV does _tons_ of processing to display SDR content (24fps pulldown if the panel isn't 120hz, motion/judder compensation, "sport mode" and a bajillion of other things,…

When people say they want a dumb TV, they usually don’t mean „without advanced silicon“. They mean built-in media streamers, operating system, data collection, ads and bloatware.

Those image improvement algorithms don’t run on a general-purpose CPU, there are specialized chips for that.

Re: Ask Wirecutter: Can you recommend a not-smart TV for me?

#800

Post by bambax »

> By connecting to the internet, these smart TVs provide relatively seamless access to the 11-billion streaming services at your disposal (...), as well as to security and features updates

The reason they need to provide "security" updates is because they're connected to the internet in the first place!

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