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
Yes, going to take care of that. Thanks for the heads up. I really looked that one over...didn't think too much of it as the domain was available. It's hard to do anything the easy way nowadays!
this is a good example of a preemptive design choice. it's almost always better to optimize for success today, not for success in the future. imo a name like "slab", or even literally "dumb tv" would be much more effective.
I think it needs just a bit of fool-proofing in a couple dimensions though:
(1) Ideally, the brand would also be able to speak to the segment of people who aren't going to get the wordplay.
(2) Also, there's the age-old pronunciation question. Is it just "Primitive"? Is it "Primi - Tee - Vee"?
It's quite close to being a great brand, though. I wonder if it just needs a skillfully-placed lowercase letter, or a couple dots, or something — maybe some sort of subtle variation could solve both problems.
Hi lagrange77, I like this name too. Thank you for the suggestion. It's a bummer that primi.tv is already taken, but I'm fairly optimistic that I can find another easy-to-remember domain. Also, I'll do some digging beforehand to make sure that I'm not overstepping any existing trademarks or copyrights. If everything works out, I'd like to give you one of these displays if and when I get the prototype unit off the ground. Would that be okay?
Hi pupdogg, thank you very much for the generous offer!
Actually, I don't own a TV, and besides, it would be the coolest story to tell when people ask me where I got this device. So I would like to gladly take you up on the offer IF you actually end up using the name, everything worked out as you hoped and you're in serial production.
I really like the design btw, clean, uniform bezels and logo-less. That's what i always look after for my computer displays.
According sources in the Wikipedia article about: idiot:
The word "idiot" comes from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης idiōtēs 'a private person, individual' (as opposed to the state), 'a private citizen' (as opposed to someone with a political office), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill, layman', later 'unskilled', 'ignorant', derived from the adjective ἴδιος idios 'personal' (not public, not shared). In Latin, idiota was borrowed in the meaning 'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'. In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', and added the meaning 'stupid' in the 13th century. In English, it added the meaning 'mentally deficient' in the 14th century.
But who/what are you calling "idiot" and why? I would never think of calling that a plain HDTV set - it is still a technological marvel (and also would have all kinds of "smarts" built in anyway, just no apps or wifi).
maybe something like dumb.box ? I think the .box suffix might be very appropriate, something like brainless.box or whatever, I know it's unconventional though, perhaps .tv is better
I live self deprecating humour but it negatively affects me at work, I imagine dumb.tv or idiot.tv may have similar problems. But maybe also you go viral because of it, who knows.
GOTO no longer considered unsafe! (Actually, it never really was all that unsafe, anyway, the function guys just established themselves as the new programming hipsters...)
Not impossible to rank for. For example, see "stripe", or even my business, Keygen, which now ranks #1 for the term "keygen" after 7 years (funny fact: HN poked fun at me when I claimed I'd rank #1 for the term in my 2016 Show HN).
STANDARD is probably not the best choice for short-term SEO, though. :)
Kind of like framework laptop though. So while I agree search wouldn't be great to start, This isn't a TV for the masses if we're being honest. It will be high word of mouth and on niche tech sites.
Maybe consider picking another brand, sooner rather than later?
I like the name "dumbo", maybe coming from "dumb TV" and Jumbotron -- a nice, big TV/display without all the "smart TV" problems, and having fun naming something that's a bit of a cult niche -- but I also want your business to succeed.
(Disney has been putting their Dumbo on TV since at least the 1980s. I don't know whether there are other Dumbos, but I could imagine lawyer billable hours destroying your margin regardless of the theoretical defensibility. Also, separate from US govt. offices and courts, there's ICANN, and I guess you could suddenly lose your domain name that way.)
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 should not be the fastest device in the chain.
I assume your commercial displays have a time-to-first-image that more closely resembles a computer monitor. That's what I want in a TV. If Apple had a TV-version of CarPlay that TV manufacturers could license, I'd be pretty happy with that.
Given that embedded TvOS isn't coming any time soon, my ideal TV would have:
* 70" - 80" screen
* the smallest possible bezel
* 4k HDR
* capable of professional color calibration
* one HDMI 2.1 input with ARC
* TV tuner with auto-scan
* any crappy speaker will do (I'm not going to use it)
* IR/RS-232 control with distinct codes for on and off (i.e. not toggled)
* excellent CEC support
* time-to-first-image under 3 seconds, immediate audio
Nice to haves:
* simulated snow for dead channels/no input (much nicer than blue IMO)
* power, HDMI, serial connections should be down-facing
* physical buttons on the back of the TV for power, channel, volume, menu
* a rear or bottom-mounted red power LED that reflects off the wall/table
I would be willing to pay $3000 - $4000 for this TV, with the expectation that it would last at least 15 years.
[1] In December 2008, I bought a Samsung LN52A750 52" 1080p TV for $1937. That's roughly $2772 inflation-adjusted. It has a huge bezel; a modern TV with the same physical dimensions would be closer to 60" diagonal.
This is a very good and comprehensive list. Thank you! Our industrial displays already have most of your "must-haves," except for three:
1. Professional color calibration - this is doable, but it adds significant cost. When referring to color calibration, it is not the typical marketing gimmick used for consumer displays, but instead something equivalent to what you would get with Sony's BVM-HX310 reference monitor. So, my question would be what level of professional color calibration is acceptable?
2. HDMI 2.1 - HDMI-2.1a to be specific. Our controllers are all compliant up to HDMI-2.0 as of now. This is something in the works, but due to chip shortages, it has been challenging to come by industrial-grade chips/SoCs that handle HDMI 2.1a. However, this is on our radar.
3. TV Tuner - it is unclear if you mean an actual channel tuner or an auto-scanner for the available input. If referring to a channel tuner for COAX-based inputs, this is something that has been phased out, not by us but by our chip suppliers.
Regarding the price point, that sounds very doable. My personal expertise is in overall system integration and sheet metal design. The intent is to create even the consumer-grade display with a fabricated aluminum shell that feels rock-solid and heavy-duty aesthetically.
FYI, all the "nice-haves" are also already present, with the exception of down-facing connections. Can you clarify? Also, did you check out the pictures from my link above?
Color calibration - I'm not entirely sure what would be involved here, TBH. "Professional" in this context would be what a pro home AV installer[1] would look for, not what a Hollywood color grader would need.
TV Tuner - Yes. An ATSC tuner with a COAX antenna input that can auto-scan for receivable channels. If this isn't feasible anymore, then I guess the HDMI input doesn't need ARC.
Connectors - looking at your photos, your input connections are on the side. If you put them on the bottom (down-facing), I think they'd be easier to reach if the TV is wall mounted (maybe not as easy if its on a table-top stand though). As long as they don't stick straight out the back, any orientation would be acceptable.
What's your experience with outdoor displays? 1000+ nits, IP-67 rated?
In that case, I would say that color calibration is very easy to accomplish and having the connectors facing down is something I was already planning to do. Our industrial displays are typically mounted 15-20ft in the air, so customers have an easier time accessing them from the side while on their lift.
As for outdoor TVs, that's a whole other Pandora's box, but yes, we also make those displays, mainly for digital billboards, advertising, and rental purposes. They typically range from 5000 nits to 12000 nits in brightness, and their pixel pitch ranges from 3mm to 9mm. They're all IP67 rated. Displays with a brightness lower than 5000 nits are typically indoor LED displays with much finer pitch, ranging from 0.9mm to 6mm. A 0.9mm pitch would be very similar to Samsung's QN90A series TVs with QLEDs (a marketing gimmick for an actual LED pixel-based display). These displays may cost a pretty penny, but we hope that once semiconductor plants are up and running in the US, costs will start to come down. Here's a project we did with a circular 3mm display back in 2017. This unit is 7ft tall with a 4.5ft diameter: http://bit.ly/43keDD5
So my use case for outdoor displays is in the recreational marine market. Screen sizes are typically between 7" and 18" with some very high-end "glass bridge" displays coming in around 24". Retail for a 12" chart plotter is $4000. Typical display brightness is 1200 nits, which is OK, but still hard to see in direct sunlight with sunglasses. Conversely, they also don't get dim enough at night.
The glass bridge solutions all use a "black box" chart plotter (essentially a rugged PC) and dumb displays. But the smallest displays are 16" and way more expensive than the integrated solution.
I'd love a 12" to 15" HD display with capacitive touch, optically bonded LCD, wide viewing angle, viewable in direct sunlight (with sunglasses), and dimmable to nearly off (20 - 50 nits maybe?) so that its not blinding at night (not city night, but offshore night). It should have one cable: a USB connection for power, video, and HID output.
In the vein of your pole display, a 14-18" tall, 4" wide screen would be very cool for the sailing market. Most folks mounting mast displays are still stacking a bunch of individual 3" or 4" monochrome LCDs (at $1000/ea).
Thank you! I think I know what you're talking about. I live in a gated subdivision where the gate entrance control panel has a similar 15" screen but with terrible brightness and UI. Your display also sounds a lot like an HMI panel but for outdoors. Do you happen to have a product link for this display with an embedded PC? If the market is big enough, I'd be more than willing to explore some sort of joint venture with you.
Thank you! What you see in there is a WebGL creative put together using ThreeJS running at 60FPS on a RaspberryPi with a custom/frameless Chromium build. This was back in 2017, and I can only imagine what someone can accomplish nowadays!
Yes, a few of our permanent install/broadcasting projects use TouchDesigner and Ventuz. For rental applications, Resolume, Modul8, and VDMX are preferred depending on the use case.
FYI, this is our current OSD structure: https://imgur.com/xNnsjwT. If you look at the "User Color", it lets you set independent gain/offset for each color channel. You can also select one of the predefined "Color Balance" options between Warm, Normal, Cold, or sRGB. The sRGB option arranges the panel color to the sRGB gamut. Additionally, you can set the Gamma curve between 1.8 all the way up to 2.2. I hope this information helps.
> So, my question would be what level of professional color calibration is acceptable?
Naively, I'd say… Delta-E <5. Asus ProArt monitors originally shipped with that, and could be calibrated by the user to Delta-E <2; afte a while, Asus simply started shipping them them with the latter.
Personally, I explicitly do not want a tuner in a TV. I would much rather feed that through my existing system and have the TV be as dumb as possible -- I literally just want a display.
Down-facing connections are a must.
I also don't want anything except a power button -- no channel, volume, menu, etc. I don't want crappy TV speakers and I'd really rather not have an OSD. I would love a display where I could fire up some software on my computer and have it issue commands over HDMI CEC to change settings. There are USB CEC adapters out there that would make this possible if computer HDMI ports won't emit CEC commands for whatever reason.
Ideally, strip the display down to the simplest possible thing and focus on the core features: big display, small bezel, high resolution, HDR, color accuracy (configurable through the aforementioned CEC mechanism). I don't even need multiple inputs: just give me one working HDMI input.
Eh, menu for basic colour calibration would be nice, doesn't need CEC for that though. I do agree with throwing out the speakers, many people have at least a sound bar and those that don't are unlikely to want this product (That market wants all in ones). I also agree with the tuner, there would be no DVR, signal filtering, etc on the TV but those may be desirable and would therefore require an external tuner anyways.
Agree on exactly 1 HDMI input honestly. It's much easier to have the rest of my system mux HDMI (because you either have a receiver, or just a simple switcher, or exactly 1 device anyway).
Then I'm afraid it's not possible. The reason the input switch takes so long is because of the HDID negotiation.
A video mixer acts as the source and sink for the output and the inputs respectively, where a HDMI switch will just physically disconnect and connect the output port to a different input port, meaning the HDID negotiation has to be re-done every time.
It still seems the right hardware, upstream or downstream depending on which direction you're viewing things from, could keep the connection alive with the HDID pre-negotiated. Like, assume the hardware doesn't change between switching. If you're the TV's firmware and have the CPU power to, why renegotiate when switching inputs. Solve for the default case and have it standing by and running hot. it's not like the panel is going to change in the interim.
My TV is 12 years old, so I don't think it's unreasonable? Only down-side to the old TV is I have to strip HDCP to hook it up to my laptop through my receiver (a direct connection works because it negotiates the older version).
So I have had to suffer being given the gift of my neighbor, an AV-file, setting up a home theater style setup. Personally I’m not super happy with what he did. I have a full size rack meant to be filled with electronics I don’t want, and hundreds of feet of wire to locate said rack to a closet so there is no entertainment unit under the TV.
All of this is overkill in my opinion. However… I think this is a core market for you. Between the Enthusiasts on Reddit and the home theater market there are a lot of people that would appreciate a highly tunable screen where they can have their AV closet run the show without Samsung, Google, or Roku in the way.
One of the most painful parts of my install was getting an HDMI Balun that would operate in 4:4:4 color space, provide 7.2 ARC, provide CEC, and provide IR… and work reliably. This is a tall ask because it’s supposed to use CAT6 between the ends. The expense of these units was high (300-500) and the reliability wasn’t great. A lot of the reason for this pain is the idea that you can upgrade later without running a new set of wires. Ultimately I said screw it and ran an optical HDMI cable (and am very happy).
You would really engage with this market if you integrated this functionality into your TV so you only needed to run a cable and attach the receiver side Balun. I don’t know where the pain came from but this feels like something that the native TV hardware could expose over a cable. Some people have Toslink run through their walls as well which would be a good option to support as well.
You're right, extenders can be expensive, but they can save you a lot of trouble if you choose the right one. My go-to choice is Atlona, especially this one: https://atlona.com/product/at-ome-ex-wp-kit-lt/. The best part is that the destination end is powered by PoE, so you get active conversion all the time. We've used these very reliably (I would say they are industrial-grade) for the past 10 years.
We do have a few LCD controller boards that support IP TV, but the downside is that they use 264/MPEG-4 AVC compression for transport.
If you can really make a 100% unconnected one, not even for firmware upgrades (just let me use that damn USB port), or Smart but with 100% Open Source firmware -drivers included-, and possibly sell it in the EU too, I'm in. I'll soon (2-3 months) have to buy one, and I'll be probably shelling out like 3-4 times the cost of a Smart TV to buy a signage display to connect to my Kodi based system just not to have spyware running in my next living room, so unless I'm a complete idiot, I guess there's a market for a lower cost one, even though as a consumer product it wouldn't be rated to last as much as signage displays are.
A final thought: Arduino and the Raspberry PI became the reference in the makers community, not because they were better and/or cheaper but because they were reasonably good and cheap, but most importantly they were very well documented and offered standard connectors that would allow makers to build their devices knowing they would be compatible with the new models. If you make a 100% Open Source dumb TV with a rear Open Source well documented connector allowing tinkerers to extend the device functionality beyond adding a TV box (which in most cases just moves the privacy issue one HDMI cable away), your product would be extremely well received by the tinkerers community, and probably much beyond it.
Many uses where having a low cost computer device on board might come handy, but one couldn't give away privacy and security for that. Adding an external RPi or similar board today could require some non trivial amount of money (board+case+cables+psu) so if that could be done at a smaller price still maintaining openness, why not?
Is there any chance whatsoever that you can use open source software/firmware for it?
I am not in the market for a TV and I am only a hobbyist with a tendency to spend more than I should on anything that lets me open the hood and tinker with it. If there is any consumer electronics company that wants to be the anti-Apple, I'd support it in any possible way.
Seriously, I even wonder if there could be some type of "Patreon-based" R&D for consumer eletronics. Get a group of software and industrial engineers to design and build all sorts of different projects, and patreons would get access to early prototypes and would be able to "buy" the finished products at cost.
I’m not a licensing expert but my general vision is that if we can get assistance from community firmware designers, I’d be more than willing to champion this initiative. Would love to create an evaluation board that others could utilize around come up with their own interpretation of a perfect display.
Both varied control and power options are really valuable. Power is easy: if it's DC in with a separate brick, please use a common connector :). If it has an integrated power block with an AC input, an alternate DC input would be very nice.
For control… it's really a question of balance. "all the things" sure would be nice, but with a mid 4-digit price I think putting a small fully-open Linux embedded board inside would be awesome. Some existing SBC or SoM is preferable over rolling your own, the latter would just splinter off a separate community for no good reason. Also make sure the embedded system has full control over all functions (there should be enough GPIO & I²C…) and has its own power control. Having it able to actually drive the TV display would be nice (and easy these days) but isn't even the point :).
If you don't stick that in, how about a slot/connector for a Raspberry Pi compute module — or some other reasonably sourceable similar module?
Barring that, RS-232 for control is a bit dated, I'd really expect both an USB device port (control in) and an USB power output, ideally USB-C PD capable, to run some small system off. If you have the pins & functions, please spend the extra $5 and wire up leftover "random" interfaces, e.g. CAN or RS-485. Ethernet without adding a full SBC is kinda "meh", putting together some embedded OS with networking is significant effort for very little return.
Look, every TV UI is slow. But how can games have responsive UI on 8-bit hardware? People are doing things wrong. You have a real chance here of having a UI which is instant.
Because 8 bit hardware was realtime? It's quite difficult to implement everything we expect likely nowadays without multiprocessing... realtime Linux exists but it's not a panacea
Honestly to compete with mass market TVs, it's going to be difficult to avoid have more- not less "bloat". Built-in Android would be a great selling point (saves you $200 on a NVidia Shield as long as it doesn't track you or lock down features). Built-in AI upscaling is a good selling point.
I would also think if you have a OLED or edge/direct LED backlight LCD then you also need to run much more complicated pixel/zone brightness algorithms....
There's probable more memory allocated per frame on a modern 4K TV than an 8-bit computer had in total.
Every real-time game ever defies these arguments. It sounds reasonable until you load a game and start using it. Effectively no lag, counted in the milliseconds.
No, the reason that UIs are slow are because they are often a web browser, running a Javascript bloatware UI with it's shadow DOM or whatever, and there's a heaps of bullshit going on before anything happens on screen at all.
And this is fine! For many use-cases, comparatively beefy PCs, web pages etc.
But for what is effectively an embedded product which will get updated seldom if ever, THIS is the time to take a step and rethink what you are doing.
For a non-smart TV you definitely don't need Linux, (but you could!) and you don't need to care if it's realtime or not. There should be only one or two processes running anyway, so there shouldn't be any competition between different threads. It's should all be coded like a classic, tight game-loop.
AI upscaling and Android... dear lord. Just give me something which isn't fucking slow and frustrating to use. I thought I was in the thread which discussed non-smart TVs, did I miss something?
These things are complicated enough to justify an operating system, it might as well be an operating system we're all familiar with. Linux scales down to a basic firmware as well as up to a desktop operating system. FreeRTOS is also an option though.
I'd love a list of products that are open-hardware or open-source source software or just even open enough to easily use them using open source solutions.
But would you pay 2x for an industrial panel? These panels might last longer at brighter drive outdoors and in well lit areas but they won’t look anywhere near as good as a consumer OLED for viewing movies and gaming because of both panel and processor. Seems like a different (and wrong for this use case) set of priorities. My OLED LG CX is not on the network - the UI is - it’s fine, I haven’t found the LG UI to be too laggy which is a pet peeve - certainly not annoying enough to throw the amazing panel out.
The only thing annoying about the OLED LG TV at least C9 version i have is that it wont allow you to airplay unless you're connected to the WIFI. So you need to add a custom rule that doesn't allow the TV access to the public internet only the local LAN.
Your LG C2 is a dumb tv - if you dont connect it to the internet. You can even buy a $10 IR remote control on amazon and use that to switch inputs. Or, in my experience, all of my external devices support HDMI CEC and auto switch when i use them.
This is essentially what I've done. The TV has never been connected to the Internet and my Apple TV drives everything. I would still have payed 2x to support a good dumb TV project and would love to do so in the future.
I made the mistake of connecting my vizio to the internet after owning it for years.
It was great for two days and then it downloaded an update that absolutely wrecked the interface. What was smooth and snappy and good enough for me now moves at a snails pace and the tv is practically unusable even after a factory reset.
Opening the menu takes 2.5 seconds from button push to response on a good day for no reason other than vizio must have decided it was time for me to buy a new tv.
I used to like their brand. Now I'll never buy another one again.
The problem with smart TVs is that you can’t easily disable the offending software if you want to. The software is tightly coupled to the hardware. In some cases it will aggressively search for opportunities to spy on you.
Worst case, Apple jumps the shark… you can just unplug it. You at least get to keep the display.
The Apple TV’s hardware is wildly more powerful than that bundled in any smart TV. The current ATV 4K is running on the last gen flagship Apple SoC with a big passive heatsink attached while smart TVs use hardware comparable to that of a low-to-midrange Android phone from 2012-2014. Even the first gen ATV 4K from 2017 is several times more powerful than current smart TVs.
That difference in power is felt quite a lot in the user experience.
I am not sure if "powerful" matters in this context though. (That is, I expect the chipsets built into TVs to be plenty powerful for their intended purpose.)
Have you tried the average "smart" TV you find at an Airbnb? I have and let me tell you, it does matter.
We were staying at one just a few days ago that had a cheap Samsung TV. The UI latency was so horribly laggy that simply clicking an arrow on the remote to try to navigate to the next menu would take up to 10 seconds to finally register on screen. It was also variable, meaning some button presses only took 1-2 seconds to respond, but some took 10 seconds, and if you pressed more than once you'd end up with a whole bunch of your delayed button presses registering at once and taking you to a menu option you didn't want.
Sad to say, but state of the art in these Android menu systems is horrible latency, most likely because the UI devs are building in new javascript features that run horribly slow on older ARM processors and they just don't give any F's about the actual user experience or testing...
I love your reference to AirBnB. That is precisely when I get to experience what I assume the rest of the world is used to. Firing up a random TV at an AirBnB is simply painful. You're 100% right that CPU power matters. The delay on every menu is painful. The UX is just atrocious compared to my AppleTV. I cringe that people use this for their normal viewing.
In many cases the SoCs used in TVs are so underpowered that they can’t render menu screens without frame drops, or if they can they lose that ability after a software update or two because there’s so little margin.
Just how “underpowered” are we taking here? I’m having a really hard time imagining a chip which cannot render a menu in non-fractional fps. An 8088 can do this…
Like I mentioned in an earlier comment, their power is roughly on par with a 2012-2014 low-to-midrange smartphone, which sits somewhere between 5-15% a powerful as a modern midrange-and-up smartphone.
That would be fine if they were rendering to a 720p screen or had much more simplistic menus like the those found on most A/V receivers, but they’re usually running recent-ish Android or something similar, which has fancy graphics and animations all over the place designed for newer devices which make that hardware choke at the 4K resolution that the majority of TVs now ship with. Exacerbating this are the terrible lowest-bidder smart TV apps which are written terribly.
TV manufacturers will never ship an OS more suitable for the hardware though, because they’re concerned that it will make the TV look less modern than competing TVs. They also won’t ship better hardware because that’d cut $5 per unit off of their margins. As such, it’s best to just write off integrated “smarts” and plug in a streaming box that’s not so anemic.
The Netflix app ran fine at first but had outgrown my 2018 smart TV's IQ by 2022. Freezes for a good moment then crashes the TVOS. Hulu as well. Factory reset was a waste of time and fixed nothing. But TCL made a few bucks more going with the cheaper cpu and accelerated obsolescence.
One more reason to get a dumb display...
But on the other hand TV SoCs need to process the video signal at 4k 120hz 4:4:4 without dropping a single frame, although most if not all those tasks are most likely done by an ASIC embedded into the SoC. Would a modern but very cut down GPU be able to do this and also at a low enough power draw?
There's hardware transcoders on the chip that render your video stream. The menu system is just a terribly outdated Android SoC... the latency is entirely from the speed at which it can render the user interface and has nothing to do with how fast your 4K 120/240hz panel can draw a frame.
The irk for smart tvs comes from that fact that they show ads and slow down overtime.
With Apple TV, you can nip that in the bud. Yes, Apple TV has its own quirks but it’s nowhere near as hostile as built in “functionality” that these tvs try to provide.
And not say that streaming services have every incentive to keep the Apple TV apps improving compared to the tv app itself.
A TV with Samsung MySmart™ HomeOS Android UltraCrap Edition is not the same as an AppleTV, if you care about things like, I don't know... consistent framerate? No random crashes? Bearable UI latency?
Similarly how Apple CarPlay is not the same as car manufacturers' sorry-ass homegrown infotainment trash software.
From a security or absolutist point of view, yeah. From a customer point of view — different companies have different reputations and market positions. We might all disagree about the exact level of faith we have in them, but Apple and Vizio or whoever seem to have different reputations, for whatever that is worth.
Depends. A Smart TV is a category of TVs being sold. If you go into bestbuy asking for a Smart TV, you're not going to get a TV + streaming box/stick, just a "Smart TV" (although there is some obvious overlap here since TV makers have partnered with Fire TV and Roku).
But when it comes to general conversation (and this context), yes it's the same. Unless you are actually using a niche setup of local streaming and the Apple TV box is just a nice interface you keep offline - don't know how well that works. For everyone else, they are just avoiding overlapping TV services, as relying on Apple or Google or Amazon is falling into the same traps.
The Slamsung smart TV I have is fine, but the UI is noticeablely show as shit even with it never connected to anything (just going to settings for example) which is part and parcel of being "smart" I guess.
99% of the problem with Smart TVs is because of the absolute dog shit UI and the relatively bad HDMI CEC setups they have (at least with mine, if HDMI CEC is on, anytime the TV accidentally or intentionally gets into any of the smart parts, it tells the receiver to go to TV mode, and getting it back to one of the HDMI inputs on the receiver either involves turning everything off, or turning it back repeatedly).
Miles ahead? Last year I bought a new generation LG (WebOS 22), and its menus are so damn slow. Everything is an app. Open settings to change the picture or something? Yes, please wait five seconds to load the first menu. And then it’s still stuttering and reacting slowly.
Ridiculously bad is the „Home Screen“ (Netflix-like UI with every app and suggestions and so one in one place), which needs even longer to start.
And the worst thing is: all of these internal apps are reloaded EVERY TIME I use them. No preloading, no caching. Everything lags and needs several painful seconds to display.
(And then LG did not even bother to pay some cents for the DTS license so that I am unable to watch movies from USB sticks with DTS audio track, and I would have to convert them to Dolby AC3 first on my computer …)
The LG display is nice, though it’s far from perfect, which is a problem of ALL televion sets, and I don’t know why because _monitors_ on the other hand are always pixel perfect, but televisions seem never be able to get configured pixel-sharp, even with perfect video material. It’s ok for the money I poured into. Just a big screen.
An also bad part of LG is the lack of apps and the control LG holds over the store. There isn’t even a web browser available, just the crappy thing from LG built-in, which does not even have all TLS certificates. I wish I had bought a TV with Android.
Furthermore, if you're connecting devices like PC GPUs that don't support CEC, most LG TVs have an RS-232 interface that supports all the basic "dumb TV" commands, including most of what you'd want to do with CEC or IR remote (power on/off, input select, volume, brightness, and other basic audio and video settings).
RS-232 control also has a command to disable OSD, which has the pleasant side effect of disabling annoying smart TV bits like pop-up notifications even when the TV is connected to the Internet (and also superfluous [to me] non-smart TV pop-ups that ordinarily appear when switching inputs and adjusting visually apparent settings like brightness).
Disabling the OSD also disables the bundled Magic Remote, though IR remotes still work (unless locked out with another command) and OSD can be re-enabled via RS-232, or by simply power-cycling the TV.
As a bonus, input switching via IR remote (or RS-232) is noticeably faster than switching via Magic Remote, even if you set up hotkeys, as full-featured LG IR remotes have hard buttons for each input that don't require press-and-hold to activate (this includes sub-$10 service remote knock-offs on Amazon, which work perfectly fine IME, though you may want to steer away from these in a casual setting as some of the service buttons can cause undesirable behavior).
For my own use, I wrote a trivial ASP.NET Web API wrapper around the LG RS-232,
While only tested on macOS controlling the TV I own (55SK9000), the documentation it's written against isn't model-specific and I'm not using any platform-specific .NET APIs, so it should work across many TV models and on any platform that supports RS-232 and .NET (.NET 6.0+ as currently configured, though it was mostly developed on .NET Core 3.1, so changing TargetFramework in the csproj file should suffice to get it running on older versions).
I have an LGCX and if I hadn't connected it to the internet I would have missed out on some important software updates that significantly improved the display performance.
I guess you can toggle the internet on and off when updates are published, but it's not the most convenient solution.
Edit: But you can use a USB! Woohoo, thank you repliers!
LG (at least for my OLED model) supports firmware updates over USB, and posts firmware updates to their website. It's a very smooth flow -- my years-old TV has never had an internet connection and is up-to-date.
Thank you, and babypuncher, for this advice! I avoid using the tvos but dislike how a parade of web connected ads pop up if I hit the dashboard button by accident. Glad I can airgap it again.
Most, if not all, routers have a one click blacklist device option. Pretty easy to just unblock it once a month and check for updates?
Alternatively, for something more automated, you could just use parental control 'bedtime'. I use it currently to keep the kid from watching TV at certain hours. Could probably do the inverse and block it except for an hour on a particular day, I'd imagine.
> I have an LGCX and if I hadn't connected it to the internet I would have missed out on some important software updates that significantly improved the display performance.
Fwiw toggling the internet is an easy fix compared to the "dumb tv" way of updating firmware - putting a bin on a flash drive.
Most likely. I worked at a political company (eww) that used this data up to two years after it was generated. The historical data is more useful for political markets for advertising issues than near real time since campaign targeting usually needs to be performed or at least planned a few weeks in advance. Near real time is great for message tweaking but knowing whether there's a receptive demographic is historical.
I think you'd have to write a DNS server where you choose what to return NXDOMAIN for. So updates.samsung.com, sure, let it connect, but spying.samsung.com, block. (Obviously, do not allow connections to any IP addresses you haven't yet approved, which you approve by manually retrieving the DNS entries.) This can be defeated with DoH, or by different business units inside the company cooperating to use the same domain for different purposes, or by doing the TLS negotiation with good.samsung.com but setting the Host header to evil.samsung.com, etc. The first is too scary to ship (you have to keep the DoH's IP address and certificate safe forever; I wouldn't sign off on that), and the second made me chuckle as I was typing it.
I'll add that "back in my day" a screen could display the video signal on its inputs without ever needing a software update. But I suppose automatic time zone changes are a reasonable reason that code needs to be pushed post-manufacture. Then again, who needs a clock on their TV?
I have an unfortunately smart TV, which of I’ve never connected to the network. In general
* it is effectively dumb to
me, so I don’t care about feature updates
* it isn’t connected to the network, so I don’t care about security updates
It hadn't occurred to me that there could be TVs out there that are so “smart” that they can’t even take an input without a network connection. Such a device would be returned as defective by me, but of course I can see somebody deciding that packing it all up into the car is too much of a pain.
What data could a smart tv collect on you if you're treating it like a dumb tv? Assuming it lives its life disconnected from the internet with an Apple TV/Roku/Chromecast connected to it. Would it have any data on you other than, maybe, when the tv has been turned on?
> Once every second, software in the Vizio TVs would read pixel data from a segment of the screen. This was sent home and compared against a database of film, television and advertising content to determine what was being watched.
If you have at least an advertised number for input latency in the minimum processing (i.e. "game") mode, that would be nice. Few panels in general advertise this, but many reviews of home TVs will do at least one measurement of it.
A decent consumer LCD panel will be ~12ms@60Hz, with OLED often being faster. If it's over 20ms or so, I struggle on some old NES games.
Wait, this Disney lawsuit thing is news to me. What's up with that? You're right, in the consumer market, there's a much higher demand for 32-40" display. Our UHD controller can easily handle that and comes with 5x total input ports [ 3x HDMI(V1.4a), 1x HDMI(V2.0), 1x DisplayPort(V1.2) ] and can run 3840x2160 or 4096x2160 resolutions @ 120Hz.
I hope to god the edid on your displays doesn't include 4096x2160 for 3840x2160-native panels the way LG TVs do; it's such a freaking nightmare to deal with any sort of gpu scaling or DSR resolution type options on my LG CX due to that
I suppose they might think to argue that someone selling televisions with the name Dumbo would be trying to tie their product in with the Disney trademarked product. I don't think that would be considered too much of a stretch so I don't think you would do too well with continuing with that name.
Aah, gotcha! Boy, I really overlooked that one. My primary goal was to come up with an easy to remember name/domain that expressed "DUMB TV" and dumbo.tv was available. Oh well, I'll have to rethink that part through a little more.
Agreed. These usually come up when people use the LG oled TVs with pcs and get annoyingly reminded that they are not actual monitors. In particular it can be very difficult to turn these "optimizations" off.
Please include decent built in speakers and / or volume-controlled analog audio out. As seen in other comments[0], ARC is finicky and unreliable. I would love to return to the days when I could just switch a TV on and start using it, nothing external required.
(Volume control is essential for analog audio out because if I’m going to use external speakers I don’t want to have to have a separate volume control just for that…)
The problem is any TV is smart-free if you don’t give it the WiFi password (as article points out), so I’m not sure why’d I pay more for something that would be harder to sell second hand later on?
Personally my TV is offline with an AppleTV for streaming.
Modern Samsung TVs don’t even let you change any settings if you don’t provide Internet access and accept the TOS. Only thing possible is changing channels and volume.
(Yes, that restriction includes changing the HDMI source for your Apple TV. Simply not possible without.)
> I use a game console for streaming. Works great.
I strongly suspect most game consoles are spying on you just as much as a smart TV would and all of them currently seem to be pushing ads in your face pretty aggressively too. Still probably better than roku which records and sends home multiple screenshots of whatever you're watching every second, but if my PS5 isn't doing some form of ACR already I suspect it's only a matter of time.
The firmware in TV's can and often do get updated, and smart TVs are increasingly capable of updates and upgrades, but you're right in that now that consoles are basically locked down gaming PCs there's still really no comparison.
I did some minor ps3 hacking a decade or so back, and dumped the network activity. Every boot it would send some XMPP traffic containing a log of your recent activities back to Sony. What you watched over Dlna, what dvds/Bly-rays you played, which games, for how long and when.
I imagine things have only got more detailed since then in newer consoles.
* VRR, preferably with G-Sync and Freesync Premium certification
These are my requirements for a new display, anything that meets them in the pipeline? My biggest problem with existing "dumb TVs" is that they lack features like these, yet cost more than "smart TVs" that do.
Yes, we support OLEDs and QLEDs as is. However, "Dolby Vision and HDR10+ * VRR, preferably with G-Sync and Freesync" are some new buzz words for me. Are they just marketing buzz words or do they actually translate to physical or software specs for the controller board/firmware?
VRR is short for variable refresh rate, a feature added with HDMI 2.1.It's useful for video games, as it means they do not have to deliver frames perfectly in sync with the display's fixed refresh rate in order to present a smooth experience. I mention G-Sync/Freesync certification, because it is all too common for VRR-capable displays to only do the bare-minimum to meet the HDMI 2.1 spec otherwise.
Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are newer premium HDR formats.
I'll talk this over with our firmware designer. I believe most of the things you're asking for come standard as part of the HDMI2.1 spec and the latest spec seems to be HDMI2.1a. As of right now, we are only compliant up to HDMI2.0 due to the nature of our commercial market. They prefer reliability over cutting edge. However, I don't see updating to the new spec as a major issue. High-end FPGAs have really come down in price and have made it much easier to accomplish such tasks due to their high throughput capabilities.
Don't just do the bare minimum VRR support to be HDMI 2.1 compliant though. The spec only requires a very narrow VRR window. Lots of cheaper devices make this window 48 to 60 hz, even when the display itself supports fixed refresh rates up to 120 hz. VRR should work anywhere from 30 all the way up to the maximum refresh rate supported by the TV. That is why I mentioned the G-Sync/Freesync Premium certifications.
How will you be dealing with movie content? 24fps content is quite hard to display without proper processing especially on large screens when the telesync judder will be noticeable.
Also HDR support and DRM will be quite problematic.
I'm not too sure about this. I use AppleTV with our industrial display playing back HDR content without any issues. Here's a 4K video playing via AppleTV on a 16ft x 9ft indoor display at our facility: https://imgur.com/a/3O58O8T
Majority of our customers use our displays for Digital Signage so I would assume we would've heard of their issues if they couldn't playback their 4k or 8k content. Some of them play this content back on videowalls, as large as 14x8 configuration, without any issues. I will double-check with our firmware designer to be sure. From what I know, I believe HDCP is supported by all versions of HDMI. Older TVs, specifically the ones without HDMI input (i.e. component, vga, rca or coax input), wouldn't be able to support this. Majority of our current controllers are compliant with HDMI2.0 spec. Someone else here asked about HDMI2.1a and I'm going to get an answer on that from our firmware designer this weekend.
Signage displays do not need to display protected content, they do not need to support standards like DolbyVision and they do not need to support three-two pull-down to display cinematic content without judder.
HDCP isn’t supported on all versions of HDMI it’s not part of the spec it is a standard that is supported on top of w/e display interface you are using.
You're right, firmware designer just confirmed that Digital Signage applications don't use HDCP (he actually said "prefer not to use") but he does believe that our controllers using MediaTek SoCs support HDCP and a separate firmware build could be made for this use case...or maybe even a toggle DIP switch could serve this purpose on the controller PCB.
The controllers may support it but you will be the one will have to buy a license and the keys from DCP.
Overall I don’t think you realize just how difficult your venture might be.
Signage displays will make really bad televisions.
They are optimized for long term operations over color accuracy and gamut, they usually operate at fixed refresh rates, and their latency is usually pretty terrible.
I don’t think you realize just how small the market for what you are looking to build in the first place is and how difficult it would be to make anything that is remotely useable as a display for movies and video games.
Those who want a dumb display can already buy one of those 50-65” enterprise displays for meeting rooms however they make pisspoor TVs and having to pay 3-5 times the price of even a high end TV makes them pretty pointless for even the user base that might want that.
The large format gaming monitors are an option but recently they are adding “SmartTV” features to them because that’s what most consumers seem to want.
Both LG and Samsung are making 30-40” gaming monitors with apps these days like Netflix because they seem to be quite popular with students and flatsharers.
I understand what you're saying. We work directly with Samsung. While HDCP may be a challenging idea due to licensing issues, obtaining LCD panels with faster response times and higher refresh rates isn’t a problem for us. In fact, these consumer-grade panels are much more readily available than actual industrial panels. If we encase these 32-40" panels in an industrial metal casing, we can create a product that is more desirable than similar models housed in plastic with SmartOS, and more affordable than an Apple XDR.
> we can create a product that is more desirable than similar models housed in plastic with SmartOS
I would not pay a premium for metal case - and I am not in the cost conscious above all consumer market. I am really skeptical there is a large contingent that would. In any event - maybe no smartos, but this minimal firmware would have to be beyond reproach, and support Dolby Vision, proper tone mapping, GSync/Freesync/VRR, isf calibration, substantial Rec 2020 gamut, and probably excellent upscaling. You’re never gonna attract the cost conscious market - the segment beyond that has very particular standards. I dont see how you can survive excluding either one of the gamer or cinema enthusiast markets - especially when the current high end TVs already cater to both. Just because the LG C- series of TVs are clearly a consumer product does not mean they are junk. And the software isn’t nearly as bad as people gripe about (at least in the higher end market where you’d be competing) - not enough to forego actual image processing features.
Elsewhere was dismissed consumer display color calibration as a “marketing gimmick” - it isn’t. These TVs have fantastic accuracy out of the box, but because they’re carefully designed and factory set that way. I think you are too dismissive of the existing market.
The panel isn’t the important part, how you drive it is.
TV manufacturers spend a lot of time and effort on figuring out how to drive these panels effectively and they build their own silicon for this.
Even tho most TVs use the same MediaTek SoC for the smart features as well as the I/O they have their own image processors and drivers on separate silicon.
I suspect that if you are serious about this you’ll be far better off partnering with an OEM who already manufactures TVs and just toning down the SmartOS features.
Getting a display to operate at 10ms or better response time and supporting VRR have the image processing required to display all types of media content, supporting HDR with proper tone mapping, getting the color science right and much more is going to be an monumentally complex task to achieve.
Hey, this thread is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone seemingly wanting HDCP, why is that? Isn’t everyone’s goal to strip it away from the video feed so it stops getting in the way? Is there some benefit to it I’ve missed?
Because if you don’t support it you won’t be able to play any protected content on it which means no AppleTV, FireTV or any other TV box at least above 720p SDR.
Thanks so it is just a roadblock. Please excuse me to keep going: most things either play or don’t play depending on that HDCP (yeash HD CP :s), but if I strip it away using say the second output of a splitter it will play. Is it the case that for example appleTV box will only output 720 if it doesn’t get some kind of positive handshake?
Allow me to add that every time I’ve removed it I’ve had full licensing and permissions, just that HDCP was in the way.
Yes if the source device does not get a handshake and a continuous one as there is one at least every 7ms they won’t display content or display it in a degraded form.
Same goes for not supporting HDCP of a specific version e.g. a display that supports only HDCP 1.3 but not 2.0 will be able to display 1080 Blu-ray’s but not 4K ones.
Yes in theory you can rip it off however that is very expensive and difficult especially with more recent standards (I’m not aware of any way to strip HDCP 2.1 and higher) and bandwidths.
Also to strip it you still need to get a license and keys so it would be quite difficult to do so on a commercial basis especially in a country with strong rule of law.
It's strange that a company as large as Walmart has a shopping category dedicated to "HDCP Strippers" at https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/hdcp-stripper. Upon further research, I stumbled upon numerous YouTube videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5-PJpSfDJ8, where the user was able to strip away HDCP 2.2 and still achieve 4K@60Hz output. The user also mentions that it would work with a 120Hz panel. This raises the question of how Walmart is able to get away with this, despite the rule of law.
HDCP is separate from HDMI. You can be spec compliant with HDMI at any version and not support HDCP. That said I would be surprised that a display controller in common use would not support HDCP.
4K or 8K content sure, but what about HDR? Especially at sizes less than 40” that’s more important than res for viewing content.
Have you considered making the firmware open source? Or at least hackable so folks could run open source on it. The BoM and hardware design would be nice too, but thats a bigger ask :)
It would be so cool if it supported something like an insertable Raspberry Pi like these NEC displays did, but with standard consumer TV display characteristics (4k, > 60hz, etc)
I'm glad to see you are actually doing this. I always remember your post from a few years back about building Industrial monitors and talking about this idea out loud and me thinking: "Fuck yeah I'll buy one." That idea has always stuck with me.
All my TV's have computers hooked to them, mainly low power x86 systems and run Linux or 9front on them. Linux gets me a browser which makes into a useful internet toaster to watch hulu, browse and so on. Then I can open terminals and whatever while I'm on the couch or in bed. It's 1000x more useful than a smart TV or even a TV stick.
Is the rS232 protocol ASCII based?
Sizes I use at home range between 32 and 55 inches. And I both stand them on tables or wall mount.
I would love to keep tabs on this. I'm sure it would interest redditors at r/privacy too.
I've often though about going for something like a Sharp/NEC Display, because I often use my T.V. as a PC monitor and want to be sure it's not phoning home, but the idea of being able to slide in a compute module is also generally interesting. One of the things that always stops me is the quality and responsiveness. It would still be in my living room, so I still want a nice picture and features like variable refresh rate for devices like a PS5.
Sounds great! What price point are you aiming for? Will this be much more expensive than inexpensive Samsungs/Vizios that are subsidized by data collection?
I haven't done much market research in that aspect yet but we currently sell our industrial 70" display @ around $9-12k/ea depending on the configuration (ie type of metal shell aluminum/stainless/carbon-steel, ethernet support, protective polycarbonate screen in the front to prevent damage from industrial machinery). However, I expect the consumer grade to be much more cost effective considering the sizes in demand would are much smaller (32-40"). Since I have more experience in sheet metal design/fabrication for the enclosures, I still plan on building these TVs inside a metal shell (specifically aluminum) instead of a plastic housing like your standard Samsungs/Vizios. I'm open to market consensus as to what is the most favorable price point for the size.
FWIW, I'd be looking for a 65" or larger, but to be honest those prices probably wouldn't work for me. But regardless, I'll look forward to seeing your Show HN when the time comes!
We ship globally to our customers right now but I believe having a distribution channel for global retail would be much wiser. I'm definitely open to it once we get to that point.
How about having a built in open source capability that can be turned off/on (i.e. it has a basic firmware/OS, but can boot into essentially a linux distro)? To me that's what would be great, since it extends the main problem that's maintainability of the 'smart features'. Bonus points if the smart board is modular and can be swapped for a new version without much trouble.
I am so excited for such a TV, here are some name ideas for you: plainum-TV, gramseye, you-control-it(still comes with a remote), BarelySmart, SmartEnuff, MindYouTech, AllPane, SimplePaneVision, Plainorama, Plainoramic Vision.
HDMI such an abomination thrust upon the world. Why do we accept a TV going blank for seconds for any reason in 2023. Lawrd help us all. Can you optimize HDMI resync in any way? That would be a major selling point. Maybe blend the output between what was shown and what is about to be shownn (apply a gentle blur filter to the last seen frame for a few moments and fade to black after 3-4 seconds.. float a gentle explainer message “HDMI sync lost….” After 3 seconds)
this is the type of monitor I'd buy if the the spec and price was somewhat in range with the rest of the market. I love the idea of single-purpose device in an square metal case that made no compromises for esthetic or to try to fit in a showroom.
It's always frustrating to see manufacturers intentionally make their product worse just to look better in a store. I'm sure I'm not the only one who cares a lot more about image quality, latency, durability, etc. than having a fancy rounded plastic case with a laggy netflix integration.
- PrivateTV (only you know what you are watching, or talking in front of tv)
- yourTV (you own TV. It doesn't own you. You are not the product--it is.)
- dumbTV (smart choice)
Great idea if the panels are affordable (< $2K). A friend of mine had a Panasonic plasma display as a TV and it served him well for a long time. The only pitfall with a display is that there’s typically no speaker, which is fine with me as I would buy a soundbar anyways. I would presume since it’s a commercial display all the service-level display settings won’t be hidden?
what would you be doing that i couldn't get by just buying a display from one of the big name's "digital signage" lineups? like, for instance, any of these:
Large format or digital signage displays are not necessarily industrial displays. In fact, they would not last long in a real rugged manufacturing environment where they could be exposed to extreme heat, toxic chemicals, dust, weld arcs, and physical trauma caused by heavy machinery.
Our company caters to this market by designing and fabricating our own thick metal casings for our displays. We also bond our sourced LCD panels with an additional layer of 1/8” to 1/4” thick anti-glare polycarbonate sheets to help them resist physical trauma. We have also designed our own controller that operates these displays with a super minimal/barebones RTOS. Our controllers can be controlled via RS232, but unlike other displays, we do not have an onboard PHY (Ethernet connectivity capability). This is an industrial requirement that originated due to Stuxnet.
Majority of the large format displays in the market today are more like smart TVs than actual dumb TVs, and though they are great products, they would not last in a real rugged industrial environment. I can create large format displays without the smartness for consumer use at an approximate 50-70% of their price.
Mostly saving money. Digital Signage is what you want if you want a "dumb" display, but they don't have TV tuner (which may or may not be an issue) and also are rated for 24/7 use and thus much more expensive than consumer level TV's at the same size. They usually have minimal image processing and very low input lag as well.
If you don't mind dropping the money then go for it, but I think most people will want to go for consumer model for much less.
Also I am not sure if those support HDR or other features that may be desirable in a consumer display.
digital signage is <2x the price of consumer TVs. i'm skeptical that an independent can do a comprable product for less, when normal consumer TVs are subsidized by their data collection and advertising businesses, and operate at the scale they do.
HDR is a good point, i haven't had a chance to use any of those newer TV features so i'm not sure what i'm missing there. but that's the sort of thing i'd wait a few years for to see if they stick around, or if they're just a fad to sell more TVs like 3D was.
HDR is very well adopted. Basically all 4K content now includes it. 3D was indeed a fad. But HDR is standard on 4K movie as well as video game consoles (excluding Nintendo Switch)
Do you have some sort of mailing list I can subscribe to? I'm very interested in something like this, but I expect that I'll forget your post by tomorrow and never hear of it again unless someone sends me an email about it once it's available.
Are you considering an OS or even a somewhat powerful CPU? I'd prefer a TV with an ethernet + smb client, but not sure if it fits your dumb tv concept :)
Do yours have speakers? Because the problem with "industrial" displays I looked at was they were just that: displays. Not everything you might expect from a TV, like speakers.
I didn't see anyone else mentioning these when I started writing. Apologies if I'm repeating someone else!
Gamers and retro-gamers are distinct but related groups.
Both groups want ultra-low consistent latency as priority, with minimal to none post-processing by default.
For modern console and PC gamers, if your panel will support high(er) refresh rates (60Hz, 75Hz, 120Hz as ideal minimum, 144Hz as recommended, 240Hz as perfect) at standard resolutions (1080p, 1440p and 2160p) please include them.
If having AMD's standard variable refresh rate (FreeSync) is an option, that'd be great.
Both a Display Port and HDMI inputs ideally, but I understand if it's HDMI only.
For retro gamers, if you have to make educated guesses as to input settings or processing (deinterlacing for example) please give us the option to override the defaults. And I guess respect what you're told the input is. Don't assume 240p is 480i, or vice versa. You might think that's a given, but it isn't.
If you're going to include legacy inputs (like component video, composite, VGA) please ensure they're have low consistent latency.
Ideally include support for the (now) sometimes unusual inputs from classic consoles or the ability to add it later via firmware updates or as a stretch goal or whatever.
Or at least test the majors from PAL and NTSC regions: NES, SNES, N64, GC, Wii. Master System, Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast. Playstation, 2, and 3. (Personal request for Atari Jaguar!)
But scalers like the OSSC and RetroTINK line exist for people who need to hook up weird stuff, so there's no massive need to bake it into the TV. So long as the HDMI inputs are low and consistent latency, anything else can be worked around outside.
If including legacy inputs is something you're thinking of doing, please have a quick word with Bob over on RetroRGB and anyone else he'd recommend speaking to.
[EDIT: Also give the option to display as much info as possible. Resolution, refresh rate, connection standard, audio codec, errors, HDCP standard and status etc.]
You may find yourself the primary supplier to the whole retro niche!
And if you become the primary TV makers for gamers, you will never run out of market or free advertising.
If you'll excuse an odd and personal somewhat scope-creep-ish request... If the colour data from the screen edges were accessible, so Hue Ambilight-style tech is implementable without having to point a camera back at the screen or intercept the HDMI stream inbound (as the Hue Play HDMI Sync Box does), that'd be awesome. No idea how feasible in terms of connectivity and dev time that'd be though.
Another thing I forgot to say out loud is this: I want it to be more DiY friendly and future-proof. I want it to be repairable and easily customized. Like offer a simple dumb-TV out of the box experience that offers hackers and the DiY crowd a platform to build on. Think MNT Reform or Framework laptops but for TV's. Like ensure the designs don't change much over time so parts are the same or similar between models/sizes.
It would be nice if there was some sort of bay to hide a computer inside of that lets the user pop a board in and turn their dumb TV into a "Smarter TV". Something like an ITX bay that can be left empty from factory. I say ITX because it's a standard that gives the owner the freedom to put the computer of their choice into it and upgrade path. RPi or other R-V/Arm SoM/SBC's adapters/carriers could be made to fit in the ITX bay. PSU would be tricky but MAYBE the TV PSU could offer an extra 60+ watts of "user power" 12V/24V DC to an internal molex connector and a little extra room to mount a DC-DC ATX PSU board? Maybe someone puts an FPGA board in there, whatever. Optional freedom bay FTW.
I know it sounds like a computer case at this point but I'd love a big ass All-in-one to neatly hang on the wall and run my Linux-Chrome Internet toasters with just a power cable and maybe Ethernet.
Top, side, and bottom mounting holes for optional speaker bars or custom speaker setups, cameras, accessories, decor, etc. Just locate a bunch of mounting holes, make the dimensions known and let the users or aftermarket fill in the blanks. If you offer audio, maybe let the user remove the speakers or replace them? Like maybe a bunch of M3.5/M4 holes on 100 or 150 mm spacing around the rear edge, closer spacing at the corners. A simple flat piece of sheet metal can be drilled and screwed to mount stuff. Or hell, mount the TV flush or frame it directly in reclaimed wood using those holes. Anything really. I cant tell you how many times I wanted to mount shit to the sides of my TV but cant. I even made a speaker bracket out of a piece of angle iron attached to the VESA mount and 1/4-20 screws to hang the speakers up higher off the sides because Sony's downward facing speakers are useless. But that is a big piece of metal and side holes would make my life easier. This is a nice way to enable modding.
Possible to accommodate a board that features an internal eDP, LVDS, DSI etc to the LCD controller? Not important but interesting.
DC power input? For a big 70" I can see low volt DC being impractical but if you plan to make smaller displays it might be interesting to have a 12 or 24V option. I work with industrial automation so I'm all about using 24V where I can. Also maybe a wide input DC supply for off-gridders running 12-60V solar battery banks. Maybe the power supply board and inlet are designed to allow AC-DC or DC-DC supplies installed/swapped in factory or field. And for DC in I'd want a pluggable screw terminal block aka "Phoenix blocks" as I don't like barrel jacks.
With all this potential I could allow myself to spend a lot of money on a hacker friendly TV. This is why people pay $1000+ for the MNT reform and framework laptop.
I'm all for non-smart TVs and have gone that route through not hooking up internet.
That said, I think there is a middle-ground here.
If its within your capacity, I'd consider allowing a USB connection. If I were able to attach a USB thumb-drive or an external hard-drive (powered though USB connection) and the TV provide a basic visual navigation system.
The nearest comparison is something like the current Roku USB app, or a more basic version of the Infuse App (https://firecore.com/), the library structure is a reflection of the file-system. I'll skip the details where a dedicated user can set the cover image for a given video by having a image filer with the same name as a companion to the MP4 etc...
I know that would be a huge jump, but I'd pay for it.
And which file formats and filesystems should that USB connection support? Should it support next-year's H269 format? Who will provide firmware updates to add new video formats?
That's my main objection to many of these all-in-one systems: the built-in technology support will be obsoleted before the rest of the system fails due to old age. I much prefer a dumb TV with a separate media box/dongle that I can replace with a new model every year to paying for a TV with soon-to-be-stale features.
That’s straight back in smart territories, and precisely not what I want. Just give me something that shows what it receives via HDMI. Give me two inputs I can switch over, maybe. That’s it.
Keep in mind that digital signage is a different use case and products may focus on that, offering different materials and performance (brightness, viewing angles, refresh rate, etc).
This seems to be a great option. It seems much harder to get reviews and even buying options. Looking for an LG OLED, there seem to be some really cool things from regular screens, to flexible and transparent ones, but I need to "inquire for purchase options" and the regular screen only comes in 65". That's a good size, but more options would be great. It's sad how harder it is to buy something that doesn't spy on you...
I've use a 48 inch LG OLED as a monitor for about two years now.
It's set in PC mode and except for the occasional time I hit the wrong button on the remote, I completely forget it's a Smart TV.
I did connect it to the wifi once to update the firmware. Note that it also took a lot of fiddling with I first got it to get a decent picture setup - although part of that was finding out that I needed a fancy HDMI cable to get 4k@120hz, and another part was figuring out that HDR isn't really viable for daily PC usage (turning on HDR makes the picture darker, because although the dynamic range has gone up, the max brightness of OLED is not that high so it has to make things dimmer for the dynamic range to be available. Plus Windows HDR management sucks). Oh and the gloss finish means it's not suitable for bright environments. But otherwise it's a beautiful screen and would be an awesome TV too with wifi turned off and connected to a TV dongle of some kind.
DIDs are great but there are two main problems with them:
1. They appear to be more expensive than consumer TV’s
2. They might be more difficult to find through usual channels because they are targeted at businesses (but it probably depends on where you are located)
I've been using a 55" LG Wallpaper digital signage display as my TV for 5 years – it's amazingly thin on the wall, and has a beautiful bright picture, but:
- it cost $5000 in 2017 and was not easy to order
- it's 1080p, not 4K
- no HDR, although it has great contrast
- no HDMI-CEC, so instead of sleep/wake on input, it shuts down and boots up, taking ~20 seconds
Wow, others have said it but they really missed the point. Most of it is just kind of annoying because they're missing the point, but this sentence really stuck out to me (snipped to only show the important parts, there's a bunch of stuff in the middle that's also annoying): "By connecting to the internet [you get] security and features updates". Did they seriously argue that you need to connect to internet, otherwise how will you keep the internet connection secure? Everything else was annoying, that made me want to throw things.
There are other attack vectors of a TV. For example, most TVs have a usb.
Imagine an attack in which an attacker gains physical access to your TV and loads malware onto your TV via USB. Now the infected TV is communicating with a nearby WIFI hotspot to upload the audio recordings from the TV's microphone (that exists for voice commands).
I think the TV is malware out-of-the-book if connected to a network connection. Either way it's actually a huge vulnerability.
If your threat model involves people hijacking your TV to spy on you, and one of these attackers managed to enter your home, you are already toast no matter what.
1. There's no defense against an attacker with physical access
2. The malware you're describing is the main argument against smart TVs. It's installed by the manufacturer, at the factory, and receives regular updates. No third party attacker required.
Exactly. The attack vector that matters in practice is having an internet connection and a bunch of unnecessary built-in spy devices and protecting against that is as easy as not having them and allowing people to make their own choices from different vendors about what will be most secure if they do want them (it's easier to replace a Roku or whatever than an entire TV if it stops getting security updates or is found to have a bad privacy record or whatever).
In this theoretical scenario where there’s an evil person in my house that wants to record what I say, it would be way easier for them to just put a microphone behind one of my paintings
> “Any TV worth buying is very likely going to ask to connect to your Wi-Fi, and that’s been the case for many years now,” he says. “If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
I literally need zero of these things:
1: BT, auto-labeling HDMI inputs: My receiver does these
2: built-in channel scanning: I live in a valley and can reliably pull in 0 channels
3: HDR functionality: This would be nice for future-proofing, but I don't own any HDR content.
That's where it became clear that the article was taking advantage of the question to frame the source as an out-of-touch weirdo. "If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart" implies they didn't try to find one and made up this content to avoid doing so. The assumed "missing salient features" are smart features; this statement framing the article's thesis is tautological.
It's a disingenuous response to an honest question introduced as "by far the most-asked among Ask Wirecutter readers", and a disrespectful, misleading way to treat their audience.
---edit--- I trusted consistent Google and DDG searches for the rest of this comment, and I shouldn't have. The following is not correct. ---/edit---
Not just readers. Is this how Wirecutter treats brands who don't treat with them? "We suspect it stems from an FTC complaint and a class-action lawsuit that Vizio..."? Why throw Vizio under the bus so explicitly? Is it because Vizio has never played ball with Wirecutter?
Do that search with Google and you will see that Wirecutter recommends a number of Vizio TVs. I've personally bought and been happy with a Vizio TV they recommended.
I do not connect it to the Internet and it works fine.
I know it varies by user but I got nothing back from Google. I posted the DDG link assuming it would be a little less variably tailored for others. That's the first time I've seen DDG overfilter rather than overselect. That's disappointing. On to Startpage I guess?
You are obviously not the target audience for this article. They also are not going to put high-quality panels in any "dumb" TVs they do deign to manufacture.
Agree on the last part. Some of these bells and whistles are silly, but the common thread in "dumb" TVs is basically that they will be using the cheesiest possible hardware across the board. Which is really saying something since they need to be worse than the entry-level Smart TVs -- which are already cost-reduced to a comical degree.
Some of my other "favorite" things about the dumb TV i bought for the kids room:
* Only a single button - you have to hold it down to turn it off, I think? Single press cycles inputs.
* Stand made of two flimsy pieces of plastic at the sides so you need a super wide table for it.
On the other hand, at least it doesn't need to "boot up." :D
> You are obviously not the target audience for this article
That's a bit of a cop-out. If someone else wrote a letter into the wire-cutter asking about the best skim-milk, and the response was that skim milk is nutritionally inferior to whole-milk, so you should at least buy 2% milk if you aren't going to buy whole, and I actually want skim-milk, am I "not the target audience" for the article?
> The also are not going to put high-quality panels in any "dumb" TVs they do deign to manufacture
I don't know how it currently is, but it used to be that there were far fewer panel manufacturers than companies selling TVs, so anyone with enough volume could make a TV, so this is only true if "they" encompasses all possible TV manufacturers.
I actually turned off HDR as soon as I got an HDR-capable TV, because it's apparently code for "eye-searingly-bright whites, including in the Apple TV interface itself." I don't understand who wants this. Maybe I'm a vampire?
I remember when HD TV's came out and it was mind blowing the difference between an old and a new TV. We had 3D TV, 4k TV's come out during that time period and they were fine, but viewing content in HDR was the first time in a decade I realised "wow there has been another shift". My partner would struggle to call the difference between our 4k TV and our older 1080 TV, but she absolutely adores the HDR on the newer LG.
I actually want eye-searingly-bright whites for movies, but interfaces for TVs ... shouldn't use 100% luma.
100% luma is going to be "the brightest object shown in all of your media collection" which is probably the sun. Since on my computer monitor, 100% luma is usually used by UIs to represent a blank piece of paper, I toggle the brightness on my monitor when watching a movie.
Funny you say that. I don’t like searing whites and I also just got officially diagnosed with astigmatism. I wonder if my glasses will make a difference.
The HiSense TV they recommend underneath "Buy a new TV but don’t connect it to Wi-Fi" is NOT a good choice if you're not going to use wi-fi. It will regularly cut away from whatever you're currently watching and ask you to finish setting up the Google assistant thing. Or sometimes it will audibly say "I'm sorry, I can't find you're wifi connection.." at random times, even though you never attempted to enable wi-fi. There is no way to turn these features off.
This article misses the point. I desperately want a non-smart TV because I don't want to deal with the absolute mess that is smart TV software. I want to have a TV with a nice panel, a basic OSD that lets me switch inputs and set up color/HDR profiles, and that's it.
Is that really a problem that happens because a TV is "smart" or not? I'm using a LG 4K OLED TV, connected to the internet with a bunch of apps (so smart) and it's ready to be used in like 2-3 seconds after I power it on. Are other TVs really that much worse? I only have experience with LG ones, so I might just be lucky here.
stayed in an airbnb once where the TV would take ~15 seconds to be ready to control, of that time, about 5 seconds was already playing content but you couldn't control the volume. I don't remember the brand, but it wasn't some unknown thing.
Did you actually read the article? They said their first two picks will boot to the most recent input without any UI to step through, which they consider acceptable. Combined with CEC input switching, I agree that the UI shouldn't be much of a concern. I use a TCL P607 disconnected from the internet, and the UI is not a concern because of CEC switching.
> 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!
As some others are noting - the article is extremely disappointing. A huge number of software developers are wary of this stuff because we know how telemetry works, how operating systems degrade over time, how internet connectivity is its own attack vector, etc. Some people _don't want_ these 'features' that for some reason the article is professing _are_ what you pay for when you buy a tv. The TV is just a display. I can connect an Apple TV or a Roku or Cable box or what have you and control the data and software the way _I_ want to.
It should be a perfectly reasonable ask that your data not be sold out beneath you for products you use - whether it's your car or your TV or your weather app on your phone. Half of the Smart TVs out there are Google TvOS stuff asking for google accounts.
If Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio for GPL violations in their TVs, you will probably be able to install open source Linux distros with Kodi on any Vizio TV and soon afterwards lots of other smart TV vendors will be similar. Eventually the geeks will create something like OpenWRT for TVs, a distro focused on improving the experience of open source TVs.
A couple years ago, I bought the domain "DumbTV.com" and considered looking to source my own television sets from China to sell at a premium with no added features besides HDMI ports. Should have followed through on that.
Unfortunately, it looks like I am misremembering. I never had the .com, but had the .io, .app, and a couple others.
The one I did get and keep was DumbTV.org, as I thought that it may be more valuable to promote a basic sense of principals that made a TV a "DumbTV", and promote that as well as work to promote brands who were consumer friendly.
I would discuss giving up that domain if it would be of interest. My email is my username at gmail dot com.
You could probably just link that to an amazon search result for "commercial TVs", which generally lack smart features and are mostly only designed for HDMI in
Honestly I don’t want my TV speakers to even attempt to be good. It’s just added cost for a feature I will immediately disable anyway because my external speakers are always going to be better.
I've gone through soundbars, full stereo equipment, etc... Call me a Apple fanboy, but my Airpod Max is amazing for watching movies with 5.1 or Dolby. That and I don't have to wake up the wife or kids.
This only applies to new models, post 2021 I think. I’m considering getting one, and I am having to check which year- model combination has Basic TV support.
Never buying a Sony device ever again. Got one 4,5 years back (3rd one for last 10 years). It had Google TV and I could not pass a screen and use the TV unless I agree a stupid EULA. Had to take it, because ... family, but they made me feel soo stupid.
Pair this with a horrible PS support and Sony is banned for life for me.
Same but for different reasons, mine was an expensive TV with a single core processor and running Android TV, and it was incredibly slow. I remember connecting via adb and watching the volume indicator applet use 100% CPU when trying to change the volume from the remote control and only showing up 10 seconds after pressing the button.
> However, you should still occasionally connect the TV to the internet for a minute to see if it needs any firmware updates, which can fix bugs and improve performance.
Yeah, or degrade performance, or brick it, or make the UI even more ridiculous, or fill it up with cancerous ads. No thanks.
We've been a projector household for a decade - started with a A$1000 short-throw, then upgraded to a A$1500 long-throw 4y ago after moving to an apartment where the layout didn't lend itself to short-throw, and I also needed bluetooth (audio) cast.
For anyone happy with up to 1080 (prices go a bit silly above 1080, at least in AU) and substantially less-than-vanta-black blacks, but appreciate viewing size (about 2 metre diagonal for us) and not having furniture obviously / perversely oriented around a rectangle that's almost always blank, it's an absolute boon.
Plug it into your RPi, NUC, etc - where the OS / UI 'smartness' is at your discretion - job done.
Same here. We can live without the extra pixels. Space is the barrier though. We have a huge old cowshed that the previous owner turned into a snooker room, and we turned into a library with remote control screen. Makes watching a film more of an event. Nice playing games at “life size” scales too. We’ve been through three projectors in 15 years at ~£350 each.
Interesting! The preferences in this thread very closely match those of ours. Irrelevance to the number of pixels and blackness of black, making it more of an event, having big picture (ours is about 3m diagonal, can't help but sometimes brag to people that my setup is 110"). For me it matters that it's also not a colossal piece of furniture, but a small piece of equipment, tucked near the ceiling and thus usually out of the view.
It sounds like a well defined niche. I wish it was a bit less of that, so that I could upgrade to a bit less noisy, with a bit brighter picture, at a lower price point than what they seem to be going for here in Northern Europe.
> “Any TV worth buying is very likely going to ask to connect to your Wi-Fi, and that’s been the case for many years now,” he says. “If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
The HDMI input labeling thing is nice. When my family comes to visit, it's pretty neat that they can go to inputs and select "Chromecast" or whatever instead of "HDMI 1"
Are there any open source TV firmware projects? In theory, I don't mind smart TV features, I just don't trust most companies with my data, and getting the interface right is hard.
but AFAIK due to their complexity and the continuous changes/updates/releases by the TV manufacturers they tend to be outdated or however compatible only with relatively old models.
This is interesting. Honestly if all it did was provide a simple OSD display for input selection or basic settings like color/contrast I'd flash my TV just to get rid of all the bloatware on it.
Vizio TVs run Linux, systemd etc. If Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio for GPL violations in their TVs, you will probably be able to install open source Linux distros with Kodi on any Vizio TV and soon afterwards lots of other smart TV vendors will be similar. Maybe there will also be an equivalent of OpenWRT for TVs, a distro focused on improving open source TV support.
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 overall (every google search for "best yadda yadda" yields a list with affiliate links now, unless perhaps you append "reddit" to your search).
Wirecutter still has some trust for me. Anyone else?
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”.
Yeah I think Wirecutter and I sucked it up and signed up for a consumer reports subscription. Anecdotally I thought there was a period (maybe 2017?) where Wirecutter was becoming less trustworthy (maybe it was when I was looking for a mattress) but I feel like the quality has returned since then. I think I especially appreciate them for their more detailed sections below the summaries. Such as unlisted products and how they tested.
Other than Wirecutter and consumer reports I feel all I have is sleuthing Reddit communities and even then it’s hard to tell if the users aren’t undercover salespeople
Web search is useless, yes. Use Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, rtings.com, reddit, not necessarily in that order. You can't trust any one of these sources to have the same priorities as you do, but you can trust that they're giving you useful, original, non-link-farm-SEO-garbage information.
Wirecutter helped me find a brand of toilet paper that doesn't turn my bathroom into a dusty wasteland, so for that alone I'll always at least entertain their recommendations. Have yet to be led astray by any of their picks.
> because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
TVs have been essentially a commodity for half a century now. I expect to see a lot of the same manufacturers in 30 years, because some of the current ones were around 30 years ago.
You cannot just "not connect your TV" because if you connect to ROKU which is connected to the Internet, your TV can access the internet.
Source: I bought a TV a few years ago, and it somehow popped up an ad even though I didn't connect it to my WiFi. Did some research, and that's how I found out.
Isn't Roku itself full of telemetry, content tracking, and ads? Used to have some housemates with a Roku and it was painful.
As far as HDMI over TCP/IP, I actually tried to get a TV online once via a Roku and Ethernet over HDMI but it didn't work. Where you able to confirm this? My issue might been my TV's fault though. Seems like something Roku would want to disable anyway since they have no incentive to get your Smart TV online and would probably prefer if it wasn't.
Yes, Roku is full of all that. The ads are minimal so far: they don't pop up while I'm watching things.
I am adverse to a smart TV because it just adds unnecessary setup, GUIs, remotes, and cognitive load. A TV should be a monitor, not a fancy hub with in your face content.
I deduced the path because an ad showed up that was for a recent film on the setup page. I don't have cable. It could not have been planted in the TV's storage, unless the TV was very new. The only way it could have shown an ad for a film is if it had access to the internet, which I had not set up. I didn't bother checking traffic with WireShark. I asked HN and that's how I found out (old alt account from years ago, don't remember and my stylometric match isn't high enough to find it). I returned the TV the next day because it was too small: I had tried to downsize from a 58" to a 30-something-inch but it was too hard to watch. I could be wrong, but that was my report. Encyclopedia Brown and The Case of the Mysterious Movie Ad.
> “Any TV worth buying is very likely going to ask to connect to your Wi-Fi, and that’s been the case for many years now,” he says. “If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
TLDR: "Even though you're asking for a not-smart TV, we're denying the premise of your question: you don't actually want one after all. Here are a few smart TVs you might like."
I have a 60" Sceptre dumb TV, it's the exact one that comes up in every single thread on this topic. It's 4K, it cost about $400-$450 whenever I bought it — 3 or 4 years ago — and it is great. It cannot connect to the internet, it doesn't know what a Netflix is, and it has all the ports I need.
> it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want
I disagree with you; the answer they give is pretty reasonable. Sceptre TVs are recommended everywhere you look if you search for dumb TVs, they're not hard to find. But people looking for a brand new TV often want common modern TV features, like HDR. Heck, I'm holding on to an old plasma set until I can get a decent OLED at a reasonable price. Hopefully where "smart" features are either absent or enthusiasts have worked out how to eliminate any privacy hazards.
A $400 Sceptre is very much not what I am interested in. But I am interested in a dumb, privacy-friendly screen! It's not "denying the premise" of wanting a dumb TV to point out these limitations, as well as offer what is the most practical alternative for most people - just don't connect it to WiFi.
> It's not "denying the premise" of wanting a dumb TV to point out these limitations, as well as offer what is the most practical alternative for most people - just don't connect it to WiFi.
They denied the premise of the question. The question was "Can You Recommend a Not-Smart TV for Me?" and the answer wasn't just "no, there are none I can or will recommend", which would be one thing. Instead the answer was "I'm not going to answer that question, because you don't actually want the thing you said you want". Since some people want dumb TVs, and they do exist, it would have been possible for the author to recommend the best example of that product, whatever they felt about it personally, or whatever assumptions they had about what the questioner actually wanted.
> "because you don't actually want the thing you said you want"
I guess I didn't feel, reading the article, that they were saying that. They never said that you don't really want a dumb TV, they said that none of them are good purchases because the vast majority of people are looking for features that the dumb TVs don't have. From the article:
> If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it
It's not that it's a mistake to look for a dumb TV, it's that that none of them are (in the opinion of the author) good buys. So it's not so much denying the question as it is making the assumption that the question-asker is probably looking for more than just the one "feature" of "dumbness".
There's some inherent reviewer bias to these things. They have a financial motive to pretend all these features matter, because what else are they going to write about most of the time?
This is a big concern for the elderly. They have major challenges dealing with "smart" TVs and smart phones – due to complicated interfaces that are difficult to operate, hard to read, hard to interact with , slow to respond do.
I see a huge business opportunity selling simplified consumer devices to the elderly. I'm surprised CES hasn't yet created a specific category or certification for elderly-friendly devices.
At least let me disable the motion-controlled pointer, good grief.
I will say though, I've only ever owned LG TVs since flat screens came out, and I've never had a problem with the "just don't connect it to the internet" strategy.
These products exist to some extent, but they don't seem very successful. The "elderly" today could be people who may have been using smartphones for 20 years, and wrote the foundational parts of all the software we use today. Soon enough you will be more likely to find someone who can debug a C program in a retirement community than an MIT classroom.
It is not only about understanding what the stupid TV asks for.
My mom (94 this year) has an iPad since more than ten years (she uses it for basic things, news, e-mail, facebook) and a smartphone (again using it only for basic things, like, you know, making phone calls) and never had any (major) problems with them.
Last december we had to change her TV (here in Italy they are switching to a new HD broadcasting standard that her - only a few years old BTW - set is not compatible with) and all suitable TV's I could find were "smart" (there are a few requisites like having an audio output - 3.5 mm jack - to connect her hearing aids repeaters).
Even setting it with "no connection" (there isn't even the Wi-Fi at her house) and turning off all "smart" or "advanced" features, the stupid tv from time to time likes to randomly display a prompt for this or that action needed, but (due to relatively poor vision) she cannot read them unless she stands up and gets nearer.
Such a disappointing answer. I'm torn between thinking the NYT is being disingenuous to avoid offending advertisers or they are just willfully ignorant.
A flat panel display gets a computer to "run" it. We get that, if you're adding a tuner capable of decoding digital broadcasts or cable signals, it can do that without doing reporting on what you are watching.
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, and these get orders of magnitude more complicated when HDR gets into the picture (tone mapping is a Whole Thing!), and that's before we've even started talking about compensating for physical quirks of different panel types.
And this isn't the "motion smoothing" (though it also does that!) kinda processing, which purists will want to disable. Some of those are configurable and can (should) be turned off, but many of those are just what's required to make the image look good, without messing with the "creative intent" or whatever.
OLED displays need to have another layer of processing applied to make sure they don't burn-in; there's another layer of logic when displaying near-black content (turning a pixel takes more time than switching a color; sometimes you don't want to turn off a pixel for a single frame if it's gonna be lit up in the next again, etc, etc.). There are other consideration for other panel types, you also have to worry about heat and bajillion other things.
This is why you won't get a high-quality, dumb TVs.
You just physically can't make a high-end TV without putting a powerful SoC in it. And if you're doing that, you might as well install an Android on it for a nice OOTB experience.
Intersection between people who want the best picture quality you can get, and who are very... particular about what software runs on their TVs (and aren't satisfied with "just don't connect it to Wi-Fi") is not big enough to make a product for, to put it very delicately.
People who don't care about picture quality _might_ buy "dumb" TVs, but margins on those are so much smaller, nobody cares.
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.
As I understand how those TV's are built, this is not true.
They are definitely running on the same _chip_, but you're right that (some of) those operations are not running on the generic ARM CPU cores. There is dedicated silicon for some of those fore sure, but it's all part of the same SoC.
Take a look at something like MediaTek Pentonic 1000: the product page talks about the included CPU and GPU ARM cores, but that SoC is responsible for _so much_. It dictates how many inputs your TV can have, it contains all the media-decoding blocks (AIUI, including things like ATSC!), and _it_ handles Dolby Vision, ALLM, and half of the niceties of modern high-end TVs.
So for everyone that doesn't have enough engineering bandwidth/competency/money to build their own silicon for things like this (which includes, oh, say, Sony.), and if you're buying off the shelf, you're getting those cores!
Thats actually an interesting angle. Sure, the low-margin price pressure has lead to increased consolidation and saving a few cents by having one chip instead of two - unremarkable. But that this exerts a kind of pressure to use the hardware that you got anyway is not immediately obvious, but probably true. Why let it go to waste? Why not collecting a bit of data here and there? Show a few ads, where they are not that annoying, really, who would mind.
> TV does _tons_ of processing to display SDR content (24fps pulldown
I keep hearing this. How did we do it in 2005? Because I was definitely watching HD SDR content on large displays in 2005, and we didn’t have the monster SoCs back then that we do today.
In fact it wasn’t until modern “smart” displays started coming out maybe 10 years ago, Cable switched over to HD content, etc, that I started noticing major issues with jutter, lag, etc.
Amazing that their budget recommendation is the Roku TV. I can tell you from experience if you don't connect them to Wi-Fi there is an LED that will constantly blink on the bottom front of the TV, with no way to disable in software. So unless you like your TV with an electrical tape aesthetic, I would avoid Roku TV's.
The one I referred to is a TCL 55S405. It seems the only solution is to never connect it to the internet, or factory reset it and never connect. Once connected if you remove the network details, it will blink indefinitely (at least for many TCL models).
my guess for why that is there is hinged on roku's assumption that most people's brains are so fried that the concept of something being "distracting" isn't even a possibility any more
If you are using the built in speakers on any tv, you are losing the game. Additionally a few of my monitors have crappy speakers that turn up as a hdmi output device, often to my dismay.
This article doesn't touch on any of the reasons why I don't want a smart TV. Sure I care about my privacy and security, I do have a smart TV, and I do keep it disconnected from my WiFi. I also have a Roku plugged into it that is likely capturing more information than I would like it to, none of that is why I don't want a smart TV.
It comes down to upgradability for me. The display is going to last far longer than the smart software running on it. Turning on my TV takes a full minute and a half before it will accept inputs from its remote, I've periodically connected it to the internet to check for updates and in two years there hasn't been a single one.
That's not true for every TV but in general my experience has been the built-in Roku, and other smart TV features are poorer quality than the stand alone sticks and either don't get updates at all or significantly less frequently. Because of the nature of these appliances they aren't as disposable so manufacturers have less incentive to provide those updates and high quality experiences as the stand alone products.
All that smart poor quality software on the TV itself compromises the core functionality of the TV itself which is being a good medium for the display of a user's choice content.
It is disappointing. Thorin used to work at Lifehacker--he did good work there. The fact that he's only quoted but didn't write it, though, makes it sound like someone just ambushed him in the break room with a question and then wrote an article about it.
Is it just me or does anyone else feel that Wirecutter only considers the upper end of the performance vs. price Pareto curve? Recently I read their review on dehumidifiers, and all 5x recommendations were Frigidaire/Electrolux models that cost twice as much as the Midea unit I ended up purchasing. (Midea is arguably a more reliable brand these days anyway, but I digress)
Wirecutter wants to tell me what is the "best" when I really want to know what is the cheapest product that will satisfice my needs.
But that's not true since you CAN buy a Spectre brand non-smart TV (which the only qualm listed in this thread is audio quality, not picture importantly) and you can buy commercial TV's meant for Hospitals and Office displays, etc.
One option is cheaper (Spectre) and one option is more expensive (commercial), but you can, in fact, obtain a non-smart TV today and they listed 0 options for them.
You absolutely can, as noted elsewhere in this (and about 25 other HN threads).
In any case, if the question is "recommend a dumb TV to me" the answer should include at least one dumb TV, even if the editor wants to note that they aren't as good as his favorite TV.
This article is like if someone asked for a recommendation on a new bike, and the answer was "cars are faster, buy a car and pretend it's a bike"
Hmm, maybe more like “recommend me a manual transmission vehicle” and the answer you get back is why you really want an automatic, and here are some nice models you can buy that are all automatic.
I don't understand why that's so difficult for people? Just don't connect it to the internet. It's going to magically show you ads or track you without internet.
Because they claim the not-smart versions aren't worth it. They suggest alternative solutions, some of which commenters here have already echoed. Why the cynicism?
Then provide the reader with the name of the very best crappy one and what features it lacks. That at very least answer's the question that was posed. The writer mention bluetooth connectivity as something they want tv's to have. I consider that feature stupid and wouldnt consider that a negative.
Can someone tell me why this is a big problem?
I just plug in a Chromecast with Google TV and I never have to touch the TV remote or see the TV's original Smart TV UI ever.
Isn't this solvable by just plugging in a $50 streaming stick of your choice?
Even without wifi, these TVs are full of slow garbage operating system, and I wouldn't be surprised if some vendor is making a TV which you must connect to the internet to use.
Even if the TV requires internet connection and the OS is garbage, once I set the input source to Chromecast, I never have to interact with the TV's OS.
Well for one thing, many of them run content recognition software and report back what you're watching, regardless of whether it's through the "smart tv" software, apple tv, chromecast, etc.
The approach I’ve taken is to just keep my TV off the internet (never join a WiFi network) and make it smart via an Apple TV, which I personally believe to have the strongest privacy protection of any smart TV device.
Another bonus is my TV UI hasn’t changed despite changing and upgrading TV brands.
I repurpose the old laptops that I seem to accumulate for this. Just about anything made in the last 10 years can handle at least 1080p video, and will have an HDMI output. I add a small wireless keyboard and use my regular desktop environment. But you can add a remote and use one of the open source media centre suites.
I do wish more TVs had a monitor-like sleep mode and accepted the command for it over HDMI. And were actually low power when they sleep. That seems to be pretty spotty.
We do the same and it works well. We prefer a handheld keyboard/mouse to control it. We've tried several and the Lenovo N5902 [1] is our favorite by far.
It's also useful to have the Unified Remote server [2] running on the media computer so you can control it from your phone when you need to.
Thumbs up for the Lenovo keyboard/mouse combo. I preferred the trackball one, but the "trackpad"-y one works well too. It feels good in hand, it's nicely sized, fits easily in the drawer of nightstand table, and works well :).
(not sure if it's discontinued btw; I struggled to find it in Canada last few years; but there are seemingly-identical unbranded alternatives usually available on amazon, e.g. https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B08H8LH7GP/ )
Of course it's not a real keyboard and mouse but it works fine.
I do use an universal remote most of the time though (Harmony 700), but I use the Rii when I exit Kodi and I'm back to my HTPC's Linux environment. The Rii is then enough to open a browser and YouTube, for example.
I've been using these for close to a decade now. We have two. They're so good, but very hard to find now. When the time comes, I'll scavenge parts from both to keep one going.
Same here. I try to find 3-4 year old laptops with decent graphics cards. It has served well as family gaming pc (casual and retro games) and with attached external drive we can watch family videos, photos etc. Not to mention ad-blocking. Every time I'm at someone's house and have to use a phone to stream things on the TV or to use those point-n-click remotes to type things I lose patience now :)
Good idea for the laptop. You could use a smart plug (one that runs esphome, for instance, athom.tech sells pre-flashed ones) to wake the TV as well. And maybe the computer too.
Yes, this. I bought an LG OLED C2 recently, plugged in an Apple TV, have not connected the TV itself to the internet. Works absolutely fine; bonus is that the apparently annoying voice control option is disabled. You don't need firmware updates unless there's a specific bug that you need fixed, and you can update by USB stick if you do need a fix.
Bought one recently as well. I connected mine because it's easier for everyone in the house, but I used a trick to hide most of the crapware: change the country to "Other" [1]
Yep. Extra bonus for LG since it uses webOS ( and that thing is great ). If you are concerned about TV connecting to something it shouldn't, you can setup a honeypot ( I think Unify still supports that ) and see what it tries to do. I never connected mine and didn't notice any attempts ( but it is an older OLED model ).
I also got a C2 and briefly connected it via WiFi before I had the Apple TV. After hooking up the Apple TV I turned WiFi and thought I was all set, but it keeps turning WiFi on by itself and checking for updates which is really annoying. Might do a factory reset to clear out the WiFi password.
Change your wifi password, give the new password to your TV and make sure it connects, then change the wifi password (either to another new password or to the old one) and don't give the new new password to the TV. They generally don't remember and try previous passwords.
Go into your router and block the MAC address. Even most ISP routers have an option for this, sometimes in the Parental Controls section. Much easier than changing the password or resetting the TV.
I see a lot of people buying the C2. Is this the undisputed winner for a new 4K television? I am vaguely in the TV market but am mildly intimidated by the variety.
I have one (coming from a 32 inch cheap Samsung 1080p from 8 years ago) and it's pretty insane how good it looks. I have to leave it in Filmmaker mode for movies as it's too good at interpolating frames on shows and colour correcting things to make it look like raw acting footage. But have perfect blacks in games is incredible, the amount of times I stopped to just look at the surroundings in shadow of the tomb raider was too many to count. The refresh rate also supports 120fps for shooters so it's buttery smooth in comparison to what I used to have. Putting nextdns as my DNS resolver blocks the ads on it and having the built in Chromecast support for Netflix and YouTube is pretty handy as well.
Ask 4 people and you’ll get at least 5 answers, I recommend reading rtings reviews and buying whatever they recommend for whatever kind of viewer you are. If you’re asking this kind of question here then that’ll be good enough.
I'd avoid anything using a QD-OLED panel for now until they've proven they've massively decreased their burn in issues.
Rtings is currently running a huge 2 year burn in test with 100 TVs [1], and have had major burn in issues on both their Sony and Samsung QD-OLEDs (while the LG WOLEDs don't have burn in issues, though their G2 had a column of pixels fail).
The LG G3 seems to compete with the QD-OLED panels in terms of colour and brightness this year with its MLA panel [2], but I'm not sure if it's worth the increased cost for most people compared to buying last year's C2.
No, this appears to be a HN urban legend. It's always asked in these threads and the closest thing that anyone has been able to provide is one person asking one time on the samsung forums why there tv was connected to the neighbour's wifi (openly in the TV's own menu). So either there's a giant conspiracy which literally nobody else in the world has noticed or attempted to reproduce, or her kids/neighbour/whoever just connected it to the first network that'd work.
If “possible” is all that matters then you have to include stuff like “I’m on a special list where if I order a monitor from Amazon, they’ll send me a version with a secret chip on the inside of the case that broadcasts my secret TV viewing habits to the NSA.”
I have a 3 month old Samsung TV with recent firmware. I am trying to use it as a dumb offline TV connected to an Apple TV (which is, of course, online). Short version is it does not automatically connect to networks without user input, but it prompts people all the time and inevitably ended up back on the network.
It won't forget network passwords without a full reset. So if you connect to download firmware then disable the connection, it is one click away from someone re-enabling it. If there's an unsecured network available, you're only 2-3 clicks away from joining that.
With other people in the house using it, the only way to reliably keep it off the internet is to connect it to a network, allow it to verify the connection works, then block it from making any more outgoing connections at the router level. It seems to be ok with this situation and doesn't complain too much.
My original plan was to setup HDMI CEC and lock away the Samsung Remote to prevent people from getting into trouble. But when the TV is turned on vi HDMI CEC, half the time it wants to immediately run the OLED refresh cycle, and will automatically shut off and start doing that unless you actively prevent it from doing so with the remote. This is annoying because they have a setting to run the OLED refresh at night when not in use. It's almost like they sabotaged this use case on purpose to force people to interact with the Samsung UI.
I should have bought a projector, assuming one can still get projectors that aren't similarly infected.
My Samsung tries to be smart too and ends up wrecking everything. I have a Steam Deck and a Linux laptop that I want to connect via HDMI, but the TV tries to do some sort of detection thing but doesn't wait long enough and does some sort of power cycle on it. The net result is that the laptop will switch from HDMI on to HDMI off and back every few seconds, and the TV will never connect. It's aggravating because it's such a stupid simple bug, but I have zero control over the TV.
Yeah, it is terrible. They have settings to modify resolution/refresh/latency mode, but those settings are always overridden if the TV's auto detection thinks it knows better.
About a third of the time it will insist my Xbox is a 1440p/60Hz input, and I can do nothing about it except reboot all the things.
Ugh, it's so utterly terrible. I really wonder, what kind of engineers are building/designing these things? Do they not even use their own products, or if they do they never plug external devices in?
My Sony smart tv was great for 3 years because I never connected it to the internet, but ever since I did, it hangs, takes 2 minutes to allow switching inputs, and in general just sucks.
I will not make the mistake of ever connecting one of these to the internet again, and if I have to buy a Giant monitor for 2k, so be it.
I'm 90% sure that the flash drive on the TV wore out and they want me to replace what is otherwise great working hardware for features I don't even want anymore.
This already happens with Nespresso coffee machines (they have an SIM that connects to the Internet, whether you want it or not). That day is already yesterday.
Wow, they sure do. Page 29 of the user guide for the Nespresso Zenius says -
This coffee machine is equipped with M2M (Machine to Machine) techology which may be activated in due time with your agreement.
Thanks to a SIM card already integrated in the machine, such network connections will offer new services (subject to further terms and conditions) to its customers and improve the after sales process by automatically communicating machine troubleshooting / diagnostics to our Customer Relationship Centre (depending on country requirements and specificities).
What a time to be alive. This should be disclosed on the front page of the manual and not hidden in the smallprint. And it should come with instructions on how to disable it with a physical switch.
If that's the case then it cannot be used in any place/location where there is no signal.
If so, then there would be hell to pay the first time if happened. If it works sans connection, then do what I've said elsewwhere and that's to cut or short out the antenna lead.
Removing the SIM may be deemed provocative by the manufacturer, if there's no signal reception then that's a different matter (the user can't be blamed).
doubtful. I'm sure it will refuse to work if it can't talk to home base, and that home base will have some sort of certificate pinning so only their servers can authorize it do make the coffee.
I think the most likely next steps is integrating with Amazon Sidewalk instead of 5G. I don't know what the relative availability of 5G signal vs Sidewalk signal is, but I'm pretty sure Amazon has a dashboard tracking the latter.
I've seen rumblings that day may be very soon, too. Once devices in the home have embedded prepaid 5G out with your control, all sorts of home networking/firewall challenges are going to arise. We are entering a world in which it will cost very, very little to embed 5G into almost anything with say 1GB of prepaid eSim data for analytics collection, regardless of whether device resides on your LAN or not.
There’s only a fractional amount of people using smart TVs without WiFi. I’m very dubious it’s worth the cost to imbed GSM cards in each TV to reach the fraction that doesn’t allow the TV on WiFi.
I've long wondered about what wifi/cellular looks like on an infinite timescale... it does strike me as unlikely too we will maintain two separate wireless standards forever for IP data. I think embedded cellular or equivelent global wireless access will one day just be as taken for granted as embedded wifi in a lot of devices. Technologies like eSims are all steps in this direction.
I've seen others in this thread argue embedded cellular isnt worth the cost, but this misses the critical point - if it costs almost nothing (we are close to this point already) and is already built into every off the shelf SoC, of course manufacturers will use it. We are talking pennies per unit at scale here in future.
The auto industry has already done this - Ford for example have embedded cellular analytics you can't turn off (or at least its non-obvious to me as an owner) on every single new Ford and has done so for several years now, and you don't pay a penny as the end user, even on their most basic entry level cars.
It wouldn't last five minutes on my car without being disabled. Easy to do, use a portable spectrum analyzer, find the source of the RF and then nuke the antenna.
Same goes for any other appliance that radiates RF signals (IoT, etc.).
You don't stop internet access or do anything to alter the electronics. By blocking the car from transmitting and receiving cell signals it's effectively the same as the car being out of cell range.
If cell access is essential, what happens in a place without cell access, much of Alaska perhaps?
I hate to think of all the lawsuits resulting from drivers who drive into locations where cells are out of range and get stranded.
Similarly, what happens when the cell phone system breaks down? And does that mean I can't buy a car if I live in an area with intermittent, weak or no cell or internet service? Hate to think what the manufacturer's sales department would think of that.
On the matter of reverse engineering, it seems to me we're just on the cusp of that. Hackers as still getting organized and aftermarket manufacturers have still to tool up for complete computer replacement kits. Reckon we're only at the very beginning of whole new industry.
Oh, I nearly forgot, the Right to Repair movement has only just begun to get organized. If manufacturers try to stop us altering something we've paid goid money for then they'll be in for a long political fight.
As I said above, just nuke the antennas (a box cutter through the antenna leads is usually enough. If you're really paranoid, short the lead out at or near the equipment end (as near as to the feed IC as is possible).
I do this on old smartphones that I have no intention of ever using as a phone again (say for testing APS etc.). It's dead easy, a razor blade through the circuit board tracks that connect to the antenna(s) and it's all over—no phone, with or without SIM (i.e.: no emergency service) and no WiFi or Bluetooth.
"…they'll embed 5G chips and do it over cell without involving your consent,"
There'd be hell to pay if they ever did that. Moreover, it'd be impossible to keep the fact quiet if deployed at any reasonable scale.
A much bigger looming threat is the possible closure of terrestrial Free-to-Air TV broadcasting (it was an early agenda item to be discussed at the 2028 WARC/WRC (World Administrative Radio Conference) but was dropped early on.
That it ever got there in the first instance is a very big worry, it shows that people in high places have been or are considering such a move).
It’s not that simple. The Faraday cage I got from Costco seems to phone home to a server in China. Obviously I returned it and used the money to buy a whole lot of tinfoil.
Anyone who says that "blocking" wifi is easy is someone who hasn't tried. Even very expensive professionally built cages don't "block", they attenuate. And modern wifi equipment is surprisingly good at working just fine with weak signals.
Google is telling me that the mesh for a Faraday cage that would block WiFi could have hole sizes up to about 5 mm. Suppose you made your faraday cage (or at least the part that goes in front of the screen) out of 40 gauge wire (0.07874 mm diameter) with the wires spaced 2.25 mm apart.
On a 70" 4K TV a pixel is about 0.4 mm x 0.4 mm. If the mesh were close to the screen I think about 30% of the pixels would have wire in front of them. Of those 30%, 1/6 would both a horizontal and a vertical wire in front (let's not go crazy and talk about orienting the mesh diagonally or anything like that), and 5/6 would only have one wire in front of them. So that's 70% of pixels not interfered with, 25% having one wire in front of them, and 5% having two wires.
The 25% with one wire crossing would have about 20% of the pixel occluded by the wire. The 5% with two wires crossing them would have about 36% occluded.
My guess is that the screen could be seen pretty well through that.
Underfloor foil insulation works pretty well as a cage. It also adds a nice electrocution risk when installing and is banned in my area for this reason.
The existence of Sidewalk is what prompted me to remove all Amazon devices from my home. I hope the range on that network is less than the distance to my neighbors house (but they're old folks, definitely don't have an Echo).
Yes. I was looking for this comment before saying the same. This is the biggest selling point of Sidewalk to appliance/product companies. All the usage data, ad data, analytics, even remote control of devices can now happen even if your devices are completely disconnected from your home WiFi. If your neighbor has an Amazon Echo... now its basically connected to the internet. Even if you don't have neighbors, there could be a LoRa gateway a mile away on a cell tower, and its now connected.
I looked into this last year and couldn’t find much. I found a few forum posts of people claiming their TV connected to a public WiFi but none of them seemed particularly reputable.
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.
If you use nextdns or pihole you can block those. I do so the home screen has no top 2/3 of TV suggestions, just my installed apps at the bottom and the hi Def paintings from the gallery app showing above them.
> Another bonus is my TV UI hasn’t changed despite changing and upgrading TV brands.
One of the recent updates to my TV's software introduced bugs to a feature I use a lot. It is very infuriating, and it's one of the reasons I refuse to buy an expensive TV. Even if the hardware is good, I'm one software update away from a piece of garbage.
An "update" to my TV made it so if it's on an input channel with no detected input for 10 seconds it will automatically switch back to the "smart" TV channel. Now if for some reason an input source isn't working correctly and I'm trying to figure out why I have to keep switching back to the correct input channel. Which of course lags for like ten seconds whenever it switches.
My TCL TV bootloops if it goes more than 3 months without downloading fresh ads. If you contact support, they walk you through connecting to the network.
This reminds me of my friend in the 2000's that would say "I don't have email" when stores asked for his email address. Even at the time, quite unusual unless you were over 70 years old.
huh, my TCL is fine disconnected... The only irritating this as a flashing light around the power-button/ir-reciever that comes on when it can't connect to a network, but I've stopped noticing it.
Unfortunately it follows that with "occasionally connect the TV to the internet for a minute to see if it needs any firmware updates" which is pointless if the TV is already working properly.
I did the same with a projector and an old Mac Mini. Upgraded the internal hard drive to a small SSD and hung an 8TB spinning HD off the back with an attached Blu-Ray drive. Has the benefit that you can do things like rip / play Blu-Ray discs, choose to use Netflix / Amazon Prime / Apple TV / Eurosport / whatever you want. Only downside is that the Mac Mini is so old now (> 10 years) that it doesn't get OS updates. But I'm not sure I care about that too much as long as it works, because I have no personal data on it.
I did this with my A80J last year. During initial setup there is the option to disable all of the smart TV features. It's quite nice. Firmware updates can also be applied via USB stick, so it never needs to connect.
I’d argue libreelec/Kodi with servarr is the strongest privacy friendly solution as it leaks nothing at all to anyone at all and there is no algorithm to influence what you watch or don’t watch. It even can do YouTube in 1080p with sponsorblock (and no ads of course)
this 100%. When I had my TV installed I explicitly told the geeksquad guys who mounted it on the wall to not connect it to the internet because I'm driving it with an apple TV
I use NextDNS/Adguard to cut out all the telemetry/tracking and have mine on a separate VLAN. I don't use the TV ui often, but this worked for the rare occasion
I attempted to do this with a new TCL TV. And continue using Chromecast dongle. But the damn thing freezes. So I'm using the inbuilt Chromecast for now!
Why do you want a not-smart tv? I thought the point was to not have tracking, but you were using a Chromecast dongle and I would expect Google of all companies to keep track of what you watch at least? Is it the security risks that probably show up after the tv software stops updating?
Here's another thing that shits me about the TCL. It asks me to sign in when setting up for the first time. You can't skip it. I thought this was related to Google TV, but apparently not. I later found a way to log out of the TCL, and my Google stuff still worked fine. False and intrusive behaviour from TCL.
Also! your average joe would think this is for the Google account and would probably put in their Google password. I found an option to use a link number instead. How many Google passwords have been exposed to TCL?
I would guess Google's privacy stuff is still an order of magnitude better than the TV manufacturers. Google actually gives you a decent amount of control over your data. There are definitely better privacy options than a Chromecast, but I don't think it's fair to put Google in the same category as Vizio/Samsung/et al.
1. The old Chromecast dongle is much faster than this new TCL TV.
2. Google already knows everything I do and I trust them more than TCL.
Playing a stream from the dongle just freezes after 30s. I'm pretty sure it's the TCL hdmi implementation, because the dongle has been utterly flawless previously.
I just plugged a desktop into my big ole TV and then get a wireless mouse and keyboard. Run Linux on that thing and I control all of it, bonus points is that everyone knows how to use it when they come over to my house.
> Sad state of affairs really when you get punished for being rational, respectful, and adult.
Do you honestly think your comment was "respectful"?
Hacker News is all about rationality and respect, and a big part of that is backing up your opinions/assertions with evidence. Challenging people for unsubstantiated claims is a staple here. If you want to be able to say something like "You'd also be wrong about Apple's privacy protection," expect to be challenged.
You are correct about Apple's privacy, but it is far from a well-known self-evident fact (in fact to most people it's widely considered that Apple is the darling of privacy), so being challenged on it is (IMHO) reasonable and even expected. Obviously you don't have to back it up, but the result of that is going to be downvotes. Also, any criticism of Apple on HN is risking downvotes too. It's not rational, but it is reality.
> Do you honestly think your comment was "respectful".
Yes, it very much was.
I didn't waste their time, I didn't preach, I didn't lecture on something they did not ask or want to hear. I simply said they were mistaken. It was civil conversation, not disparaging in any way.
If they were receptive to learn more, they would have followed up, and could have asked, and they did not. That was the choice they made.
Any other structure would allow a trap, similar to what's shown in Serenity's The Operative, and I have no time for games.
You really can't be more respectful of their time, attention, or choice.
You are right about challenging with argumentation and building support for persuasion, but that challenge was never accepted. There is an order to these things.
You can't communicate by talking 'at' people, both parties need to engage.
> Apple on HN is risking downvotes too...
Honestly just breathing on HN with an unpopular, but right opinion, risks down-votes. I've already spoken to Daang about the structural issues, not that anything will come of it.
You're being a dick. If you didn't realize that, that's what is going on here.
To follow up on GGP(?), if I was going to look into the Apple privacy protection stuff, where would I start? Are there search terms, or specific sites or individuals you can point me to?
I'm being mature, and there is an important distinction though not mutually exclusive.
If OP wanted to know more they could ask, and they didn't so I was right in my initial assessment regardless of how others feel.
I would start with google keywords: "apple telemetry -site:apple.com" are a good place to start.
From memory some of the important highlights were in 2016, there was an issue with the fast-fail network code in macOS and other devices where applications would not launch locally. Apple was forced to briefly disclose the cause of the outage, which amounted to a telemetry server update, a check-in at each application launch and other actions was required and could allow apple to decide what you can and can't run in realtime without your knowledge; there were several news articles about it at the time.
There is the more recent articles about client-side scanning, which they rolled back but they largely by default upload everything to their cloud and do it there. This is good for catching predators, bad if one of those hashes they match against (which are not unique, one hash matches many potential files, an inherent property of modular arithmetic) cause a false positive, or if those hashes match material that is not illegal, but seek to censor. They don't disclose what they match specifically so you'll never know, nor will you be able to dispute or correct any mistakes.
There have been several blog posts by System Administrators about the AppleTV and other Apple devices probing/mapping their internal networks over the years, and sending data up to the cloud. Its largely been encrypted so we don't know what it is they are sending but its a lot according to netflow and wireshark. If one were to find out, and publish what they found, it would serve as proof of violating the DMCA. So it is unlikely this will ever come to light from anyone domestically in the US or its allied countries.
SDR opens a whole new avenue to approach auditing Apple devices that broadcast that data over the em spectrum, its also important since anyone with an antenna can pick that information up.
Additionally, they don't disclose how long or what specific information they do collect about you, who they share it with, and even when you tell them to not collect info, they still do it.
The higher the amount, and time, that you store information, the more likely it is going to be stolen.
make it smart via an Apple TV, which I personally believe to have the strongest privacy protection of any smart TV device.
Except that as we saw with the CSAM debacle from a couple years ago, Apple will absolutely be scanning any device they have for anything they deem unsavory. I still can't believe people think Apple is a benign player in all of this
Or perhaps you see what you want to see in that story.
Apple and Google both scan images uploaded to their cloud for CSAM. Apple decided that they had the horsepower to do it on the device instead for only those images that would be uploaded to the cloud with the apparent intention of enabling end-to-end encryption for photos.
Factory reset a TV to older firmware version, get one used from gumtree for 20% of price. There are lots of options: my LG TV has been offline since I bought it in 2018
Another thing to look at in new TVs, both smart and dumb, is egregious boot times. Instead of the expected instant-on, many new TVs take a Looooooong time to start up - the Sceptre 4K TV I bought for the office last year takes 20 seconds to boot and display output - and it's a dumb TV!
I built IoT sensors with embedded web interfaces 20 YEARS AGO that booted in under a quarter second. It's intolerable in the third decade of the 21st century that we're stuck with boot times for appliances that are two orders of magnitude slower that that! (And FWIW, Red Hat had full Linux booting in under five seconds over a decade ago, but it never caught on...)
I have Sceptre (recommended on HN) and love it. Just hook up an Apple TV and it is great. If you are an audio snob you'll want a sound bar, but for a cheap TV it does the job well.
My beef with TVs these days is that they have no buttons. I’ve got little kids, the remote simply doesn’t stay in one place. Both of the TVs I currently own have one button on them. Why? Just give me some volume and input switching buttons please.
Digital projectors are usually 'not-smart' and some of the short throw projectors can be placed quite close to the screen or wall if space is an issue.
They're not cheap or large, but broadcast monitors can be an option here. Very expensive unless bought used though. Lots of lesser known manufacturers in the space, and some great deals can be found. The largest size most manufacturers will do is around 32 inches.
CRT Broadcast monitors are somewhat of a collectors item for retro game enthusiasts.
Yes, but they are not good. It has a jack plug that I connect to an HiFi-System.
Theoretically one could use an HDMI-splitter to extract audio, but I didn't use this, since the lag was too high.
Since getting pi-hole on my home network, I've been amazed at the amount of phoning home my old (7 years+) smart TVs are trying to do. All of the domains are about content matching, which I'm thinking is no longer happening since getting pi-hole as the domains are never bring resolved for them.
To be fair, blocking can cause more requests than "normal" as they don't always use good back offs. My Nvidia Shield used to spam my DNS with 10s of thousands of requests a day like this after I blocked the domain, but they seem to have fixed it at some point.
My solution is dead simple and easy to implement. Use a large top line computer monitor and connect one or more dumb-type PVRs/Set Top Boxes to it. Moreover, this is usually a much more flexible arrangement than a TV (and one is never tempted to connect WiFi because it's just not available—nor is there any snoopy O/S to connect WiFi to).
Problem solved!
__
Edit: Dumb-type PVRs/STBs (the ones with no internal storage and only a USB socket to add your own drive) are dirt cheap ($30 - $50 at most) and are available just about everywhere. Moreover, they're very small and compact. Because of their convenience I'll take them anywhere (couple directly into my PC or laptop HDMI port, etc.).
I have at least six operational and two are new and still in boxes (I almost consider them as disposable items—I just draw on a new one when and as necessary).
I cut the cord 20 years ago, after my last attempt to use Dish. I supposedly got 500 channels, but barely could tolerate watching 3 of them. They didn't offer my local PBS station or local networks, and the ads were so invasive, I couldn't stomach it.
My last TV purchase was a real shitshow ~5 years ago. As many are noticing, the manufacturers don't seem to want to make them. I ended up buying a supposed smart TV, but have never have given it access to the network, and disabled everything I could in it's interface.
I use a combination of Youtube-dl and OSMC to download content I want, without the commercials or ads. Luckily one of my local networks has a substantial youtube channel, so I got local content again, as well as PBS.
As others have said, it's probably easiest to resign yourself to reality. Buy a newer TV with a good panel, which will be a "smart" TV, and make sure to never connect it to the Internet. You can get a smart remote from there to overcome some of the quirks.
Tangential anecdote: I have a TCL Roku TV, and recently switched to using an AppleTV playing through one of the TCL HDMI inputs. I was incredulous to see that Roku was analyzing the signal of that port, identifying the shows I was watching, then overlaying an ad onto the AppleTV signal to sell me the show (that I was already in the middle of watching?) on a Roku channel. There was an opt-out in the Roku OS settings, but I hadn't realized just how invasive this monitoring was. The point being that you can't necessarily simply opt-out of a smart tv by switching your media player.
Pretty unrelated but something that has irked me is the lack of PIP on basically any new TV. I’m not even sure if you can get a TV with PIP anymore.
I bought a 50” Samsung about 7 years ago and at that time I had trouble finding a TV with PIP. I upgraded to a 65” LG OLED about a year ago and the picture is absolutely beautiful, it took a while to get used to…seeing a fly on the video had me thinking I had a fly in the house…but alas no PIP. I’ve found alternatives, I have my OTA hooked up to an HDHomeRun and use TiviMate for viewing…so I can get an octobox if desired, but it would still be nice to have the PIP option, especially for something that costs $1500+
this is screaming for an open source tool and/or firmware to "dumb down" smart TVs.
On Google TV it could apply app & service configuration settings to turn off networking, recommendations, home screen content and just enable the input-switcher . Since it is Android based, there are lots of tools using ADB, debug tools, device policy etc that could work.
I bought LG digital signage. It's just a big monitor with a few HDMI inputs. I stuck a tiny PC on the VESA mount, and I use that to play media and stream online comment. I don't watch actual TV (cable, satellite etc).
Too bad they didn’t list the “not worth it” panels.
I get most of my TV from free to air streaming apps and other streaming services, and I used a HDMI switch. So I can physically label the different devices.
For me it’s less about privacy (I just disconnect it from wifi) but just how slow they are. I bought an Apple TV to get around this but it still takes so long for it to even turn on
My TV remote has a dedicated Netflix button. I don't have a Netflix subscription and never will, but it wastes 30 seconds every time I accidentally push it because the UI is that slow and backing out of this nonfunctional Netflix app takes so many steps.
I know it's offtopic but I knew our leisure viewing was in trouble way back when the first Blu Ray DVD players had fans in them which came on loudly when watching movies.
You could just buy an LG TV (which isn’t user hostile and doesn’t show Ads) and not connect it to the internet. I don’t understand the whole point of this.
Are you wanting to go back to the days of being unable to watch Netflix without a computer and a HDMI cable, and not being able to play music or look at photos using just your TV?
People who request these kinds of products are just making noise and tyre kicking, when in fact I really doubt they want a probably needlessly useless TV.
I think people are generally concerned with “badly-designed” TVs and conflate “smart TV” with “bloated TV”. If Apple made an actual TV you bet nobody would bat an eye. In fact many advocate using Apple TV alongside their offline TV.
I agree that smart TVs are nice to have, especially when they receive Airplay, YouTube, whatever straight from my phone. Dumb TVs are pretty useless on their own, I only use mine to consume internet content anyway.
> and not being able to play music or look at photos using just your TV?
I… I don’t do these things with a TV?
Basically, you’re saying that TVs were useless 20 years ago? Why they hell did every household have one?
I literally just want something where I can hook up a few consoles and a stereo system, maybe an HTPC if I feel like it. It should have good, responsive controls, be solid and dependable, and large enough that I can comfortably view content and read subtitles from my couch.
I’m amazed home cinema projectors aren’t more popular. There’s nothing better than Apple TV box connected to an Epson or BenQ and screen size of 100” or more. I know, it’s off topic but why so many people still need TVs? Television just makes you dumber and is bad for your children. Also all the smart features are crazy bad. Of course the image quality of good TVs is superior but still worse than the one of good monitors.
High end tvs have significantly better visuals compared with projectors; function in more environments, and are much simpler to set up.
If you have a dedicated space and want a huge screen then projectors are the only way to go, otherwise they are worse at colour, contrast, cost and noise...
“If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.”
NO, those are also smart features and I don't want them either.
I don’t know why this isn’t the answer. I’m sure there will be some people who will bring up, “but it will connect to an open wifi network” argument; but that isn’t common in many places and it still will probably force you to agree to terms and conditions which the TV won’t be able to do.
Also what many people have missed is that the promise of data collection revenue is what has made TVs unbelievably cheap. It’s crazy that you can get a 70” for less than $500.
It's not the answer because some TVs from some companies Hi-Sense will keep complaining that they aren't connected, interrupting whatever you're watching.
That’s my point. You don’t have to setup any countermeasures if you don’t connect them to the internet. It’s a very simple solution. You’re over complicating it
My TV is a projector (Benq TK700STi) and all its smart features are contained within a Google TV plugged into the back that ships with the device. You rip it out, you just get an extra HDMI port. The only problem I have is having to dim the lights / close the blinds to watch anything, but that makes using the TV a much more deliberate act and I found that to actually be a positive.
What HN reader would actually suggest "don't connect it to the Internet" as a viable solution? In almost all cases it just leads to the TV nagging you after a while. So unless one considers frustration and not being able to use the device as a solution, how on earth is that a solution?
HN crowd making a great display of short sightedness here...
The last time this topic came up for me, I asked a related question about getting a dumb monitor without branding and got many helpful answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31708936
> If you can find one manufactured recently that isn’t smart, I don’t know that I would trust it to be worth what you’re paying for it, because it’ll likely be missing several other salient features that you may actually want, like Bluetooth compatibility, HDR functionality, built-in channel scanning, or the ability to auto-label and optimize devices by HDMI input.
I don't care about any of those features except for HDR, and I suspect that's the case for most others who would be interested in a dumb TV.
That said, the easiest solution is really just to buy a smart TV and keep it off your network and connect a laptop or HTPC. But I've heard horror stories of newer TVs auto-connecting to whatever open network they can find and some even having LTE radios, so who knows how long that strategy will work.
"just don't connect it to the internet" is such a typical HN response that completely misses the point. A smart TV with no internet connection is still a smart TV. It still has an entire operating system that needs to load wifi, ethernet, Bluetooth, usb driver stacks. It still has an awful, flashy interface that adds unnecessary steps between changing inputs. It still tries to load god knows what apps every time you turn it on.
A dumb TV is a panel, some inputs, and an OSD menu that hasn't changed since 2005. It has exactly two functions: select an input and display that input. It should turn on in seconds, not minutes. Changing inputs should have at most two steps and take no more than two seconds. It should have exactly as much processing power as is required to pipe an hdmi signal to the panel and nothing more. It should be so fundamentally incapable of injecting ads that the very idea is laughable. Hell, I'd even prefer it not have speakers.
Disconnecting your smart TV from the internet only means it doesn't spy on you and advertise to you. It doesn't solve any of the other problems making these devices awful.
And it's soon going to be impossible to dodge it going on the Internet anyway. Manufacturers are hard at work making sure that if any of any neighbor's Internet of Shitty Insecure Things [TM] device participate in the scam, the smart TV shall use your neighbor's device to escape and access the net. I forgot the name of the protocol / "feature", but it's a very real thing.
So unless you live in the middle of nowhere, like in a cabin in the woods, it's not going to work for much longer to "no enter the WiFi password" to "just don't connect it to the internet".
Just buy a projector made to project reports at corporate meetings or the like. These are still totally dumb and has added bonuses you can get a diagonal bigger than what any TV can offer and it's much closer to the movie theater feeling.
That is total unfounded speculation unless you have evidence for it. Do you?
There's been an urban legend going around for years that smart TV's automatically connect to unsecured wifi but nobody's ever been able to demonstrate it a single time. (Probably their kid had connected it intentionally or something.)
So you might be conflating that urban legend with Amazon's network of Ring devices. But that's extremely low bandwidth, and there is zero evidence TV manufacturers are trying to build in automatic connections to it.
Again, if you have actual evidence then please share, otherwise this is just scaremongering and FUD.
I mean, bandwidth doesn't really matter if we're talking about whether the device is sending home private information about what content you watch. It doesn't need to stream video back to Samsung to be basically malware.
Your car already does this. It's trivial for your television to do so as well.
Sidewalk doesn't yet have a TV manufacturer onboarded but an ad profile is well within the size limit for their spectrum. We're talking kb of json.
So it's not unfounded, there are patents. It's not speculation, it seems to be a pretty active area of thought for manufacturers of televisions, and it's used now in your car.
>There's been an urban legend going around for years that smart TV's automatically connect to unsecured wifi but nobody's ever been able to demonstrate it a single time. (Probably their kid had connected it intentionally or something.)
Your neighbours' smartTV might take on an AP role for yours.
There's no escaping the ads and tracking with these devices.
If Amazon can't do it 5G will, one of the advertised aims is to allow many more types of device to connect without overcrowding the networks.
> When fully operational, 5G networks will have the capacity to connect 500 times more devices than 4G. This is the foundation for the future of Massive IoT—a world with a million or more connected devices per square kilometre.
Now for the sentence that will ruin my credibility: they've done a pretty good job of immunising (ha) everyone against any criticism of 5G by associating it with antivaxxers etc.
> By injecting people with a severely weakened dose of fake news (the virus) and refuting it in advance, over time people can develop mental antibodies – psychological immunity – against misinformation.
"Perhaps I can interest you in my services. I specialize in foiling, in copper, the entire television set to block all RF signals from entering or leaving the device. Uh, except for the screen side, of course."
> While much of TEMPEST is about leaking electromagnetic emanations, it also encompasses sounds and mechanical vibrations.
Damnit. They're going to embed signals in the harmonics of the sound system, and invert the sound systems of neighboring connected devices to act as microphones. So you'll need a Faraday cage and a fully soundproofed and seismically-proofed room.
A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements, and your nonfunctional requirements (low processing power) frankly don't matter to most people. My smart-but-disconnected TV turns on just as quickly as my PC monitors can return from sleep (a second or two); changing inputs is just as quick (input button on remote, left/right to select, okay to confirm), and the automatic input selection when a device turns on means I barely even need to endure that tiny hassle; the interface it displays is more than a dumb monitor's OSD, but not by much.
You seem to be of the opinion that it's the principle of the thing, mine is avoiding ads and bloated/slow interface. To me, keeping it disconnected avoids all of the problems of it being smart. Those "smart features" are not features to me (or most people here), but neither are they anti-features.
> "A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements, and your nonfunctional requirements"
Ehhh I beg to differ. I got a Sony TV a year or so ago with Google TV built in. It's been a nightmare - the GUI is basically unusably slow (literally 5 entire seconds from button press to response) and the whole experience sucks.
So I did what most reasonable people did - plug in some HDMI device that doesn't suck (in my case, an Apple TV) - except that didn't fix the problem entirely.
You see, this TV really really really wants to boot into Google TV. So sure, you have your dongle plugged into this HDMI port full time but it just won't reliably boot into it. Even after setting the HDMI port as the default, half the time it insists on booting into Google TV anyway. And sure, I can grab the TV remote and switch inputs - but again, it's multiple button presses on a software suite that takes ~5 seconds to respond to a single button press. It's a good 20-30 seconds just to switch inputs.
It's maddening. So maddening that I am in fact in the market for a dumb TV just so I can be rid of this cursed UX.
I'm not particularly puritanical about this. I'm willing to live with "just disconnect it", but that solution doesn't actually work for me!
Are you using HDMI-CEC? You shouldn't be touching your TV remote at all. You shouldn't need to set a default HDMI input. All you have to do is press any button on the AppleTV remote and it will turn on the TV with the correct input device selected. I have a 2 year old Sony TV with GoogleTV and it works fine. I can go directly to a PS5 and Switch by just turning on the respective controller.
Yep, I'm using HDMI-CEC. I would love to just touch the Apple TV remote and have everything "just work", but for whatever reason a good 1/3rd of the time it just boots into Google TV anyway despite not touching the TV remote at all.
This sort of annoyance would be far more tolerable if the onboard software wasn't such a gigantic pain.
But it could be worse - I owned another (slightly older) Sony "smart" TV that wouldn't even display the Input switcher until ~60s after boot. It would literally give you a "TV is still starting, try again later" prompt for a good minute after the screen turns on. So I guess this is something of an improvement.
Sure, that stuff "should" work and there are set ups that one "should" do, but one can say the same thing about how these things work as well: The manufacturer "shouldn't" be requiring things to work this way and "shouldn't" be forcing this software on everyone.
This isn’t what I’m experiencing at all. I have a Sony Bravia TV. The TV works flawlessly with HDMI CEC and the Apple TV port set to default. It never opens Android TV, I haven’t seen that interface in months. I also never even set up Google TV or logged in with a Google account, which is optional.
Indeed. I was surprised when new Apple TV 4K remote was able to turn on/off my 2009 Panasonic plasma TV. And the Apple TV remote could be IR programmed to adjust the volume of my NAD amplifier, too.
This is perfect for me as I still find the picture quality of plasma sufficient and don’t want a “smart” TV.
My LG C9 OLED from 2019 works great with my AppleTV. It starts up quickly, and I only ever see its interface if I accidentally bump the TVs remote (all normal interaction including power on and volume go through the AppleTV remote). Of course I never connected it to WiFi.
I have one of these and was happy with it until it decided to use the notification system to nag me.
1. Lots of ads of local TV stations on the system update notifications.
2. Often it nag me about other random things too, like asking me to change the brightness settings or telling me that using the TV for too long is unhealthy.
3. Often it decides to stop work properly unless I accept license agreements. Sometimes I accept and immediately deny them again, and then the TV works fine for about a week.
4. It started to show ads for porn stuff. When I complained to my country authorities they said it was just "documentary recommendations, not ads". And thus why I can't disable them by refusing to accept the EULA for the ad service.
It’s doing all this tuff without an internet connection? Did you update the firmware since you bought it? I’ve never seen anything like you describe on mine.
I've had a couple of Bravias over the past 7 years, with the newer of the two having been purchased in 2018 and I've not seen the smart TV homescreen once since configuring the last used input as the default. Neither were ever connected to the internet though.
Also, as I understand recent Sony TVs include something called "basic TV mode" that turns off all smart functionality and make them function much more similarly to dumb TVs, perhaps yours has this feature?
Hadn't heard of "basic TV mode" but it seems to be a feature of any Google TV device made in the last year or two. They say it will disable all smart tv features and leave only the HDMI inputs and antenna input.
I bought a Sony 2 years ago (2019 model apparently and not a Bravia). It’s been great as a dumb telly. I have Chromecast 4K plugged in, use its remote for everything (sometimes control it from Google speakers and phone apps too). The official remote is sitting out of the way gathering dust.
Kinda related note: I also have smart but disconnected Samsung TV. Everything was great until a new neighbour moved in and started repeatedly trying to connect her watch to my TV. Apparently my TV has a bluetooth that's always on and has no way to turn it off.
If you don't mind voiding your warranty, physically disconnect the BT module. There are "how to" videos on yt.
Had to disconnect the WIFI module on mine (also Samsung) to make the remote work again...
Some feedback from being sort of on the other end here.
I rent a room and the tenant is on the same WiFi network. They politely messaged me one day saying “I think you’re trying to connect to my TV”. Which as it turns out was our toddler mashing the screen on YouTube Kids. I worked out on YouTube kids how to disable the option in the app.
My point being that it’s not always a rational person you’re dealing with, being able to at least disable the option is essential.
Problem is, it's not. And turning it on is slow. Changing channels is also slow. I'm not picky or principled at all when it comes to TVs, I just want it to work without pissing me off by taking forever to do stuff, and they're failing the test. My old TVs were always fine.
Also, my last smart TV bricked itself, which I'll write off as me being unlucky but it probably wouldn't have happened with a dumb one. When I was shopping for a replacement and asked the BestBuy employee if they have any dumb TVs, he said he gets that question a lot, and no. So I don't think I'm a weirdo for wanting one.
Data about attention (viewing habits) is so immensely valuable, who knows what the next generation will do to obtain it? Years ago, the TV execs told us not to have a private conversation in the TV room. We all know how very easy it would -- if they wanted -- to exfiltrate your data in a variety of ways: Kismet, group Xfinity/Fios wifi passwords, or even ultrasonic beacons between cell phones. Why would they leave cash on the table if they had the option?
You mean like using a pervasive low bandwidth cellular data service or Sidewalk or other such tech? I’m surprised blackholing your TV even works any more given how cheap low bandwidth data services are to both add into the set and provision at scale, compared to the value of collecting all the smart tab data that’s not connected. Don’t forget a lot of TV users aren’t savvy enough to configure them, on the other end of the spectrum.
There are some videos around on the internet that show how to find the Wi-Fi module on an LG tv, for example the below. If you break your tv by trying this it’s on you.
A convenient rule of thumb for this advice is that anyone who should follow it doesn’t need it. Everyone else should be redirected to a teardown video.
I have tried pretty hard (I came up with 100 common Wi-Fi names by googling around) and have never been able to get it to happen. With enterprise grade Wi-Fi gear it’s pretty trivial to create a ton of AP names and route them all to a test VLAN.
If it sounds like the idea comes with a tinfoil hat, best to investigate with a skeptical eye.
Networks with no password and no captive sign in portal are extremely rare nowadays. They are on by default and anyone with the IT ability to go in and change it will already know the dangers of letting anyone use the Internet you are paying for.
But also are there any actual confirmed cases of TVs doing this? The comment section here always fear mongers about it (kudos for not mentioning Amazon sidewalk), but it isn't anything worth worrying about currently.
Which ISPs are giving out APs with no key needed and no captive portal? Every one that I’m aware of requires some manner of secret to login to the shared AP.
There’s also nothing stopping any of them from including an Iridium modem in their sets. Or using aircrack to try and break into a nearby network. Or any other tinfoil hat thing we can come up with.
There are literally thousands of paranoid security researchers who would love to post about something like this (hi), and none of them have. That’s hardly conclusive, but if it’s not good enough for you then maybe you should reconsider whether society is the place for you.
I'm sure they're not doing it now, I'm not sure they won't do it eventually. I don't think it can be done without people noticing but I'm also not sure they'll think that far ahead.
No. Why do you think it is? If the business model is "connect to the mothership and feed us data at all costs", why wouldn't they just arrange with the ISPs to allow their devices to connect?
This paranoid alternate reality where tv companies are paying every ISP for backdoor access is very, very far away from flipping the “opportunistically join open networks” bit. It’s also not borne out by either research or logic.
> at all costs
Nothing works like that. They don’t care about you, beyond the pennies they can make. If it costs (and it would) they won’t do it.
Which ISP? Comcast in America does that crap, but it's worthless to snoopers since you need a Comcast account to do anything on it, so will actively need to log in.
>A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements
One of them will. This thread is full of conflicting anecdotes: one user's smart TV turns on quickly and works like a dumb TV when it's not connected to the Internet; another user's TV takes a full sixty seconds to get going. The fact that one smart TV will do the thing does not at all imply that another one will.
And if you have to search for what kind of smart TV will act like a dumb TV when you want it to, you are already looking for a dumb TV! You still have to look at reviews and seek out the other people who didn't want any of this corporate surveillance catastrophe to find out what happened to them. It is the same search process with a slightly broader scope at the cost of a more complicated definition of that scope.
Meanwhile, I got a 40" Sceptre dumb TV from Walmart last year and it's been a very satisfying decision. It was cheaper than most if not all of the smart TVs, too. And I don't have to treat it like a contamination risk or worry about it finding an open WiFi network. Maybe I'm just one of those old curmudgeons who doesn't care about image quality. Couldn't tell you.
You have to be careful. My Samsung smart tv throws up a splash screen whenever any HDMI input is plugged in or wakes up, which can only be dismissed by using the remote. Sometimes it even shows a few frames of the HDMI input before switching to the splash screen. Infuriating!
It didn't used to display an ad for Apple's channels but now it does and it requires the remote to dismiss... Previously you could just blindly airplay something but now you have to airplay + dismiss the ad with the remote.
I’ve been using Apple TV since the first generation and haven’t gotten an ad in my experience - did something change or a new version of the hardware I’ve not noticed yet show up? Are you using the Apple TV app itself?
That sounds horrible and I would immediately quit the ecosystem... I have never experienced this in nearly a decade of use, but I also pay for TV+; is it possible you got the bad luck of getting a terrible A/B test or something?
Maybe my ignorance here but a 70 inch monitor? At what point is it just a dumb tv? Like is monitor a term used to describe its actual engineering and functionality or just how it's used. Also if engineering, is there a substantial price difference?
I've never seen a 70 inch monitor either, but usually text looks a lot better on a monitor and of course many monitors offer much higher refresh rates.
Ads aren't the only reason why a 42" 4K TV is generally much cheaper than a 32" 4K monitor
In addition to what others have already mentioned, it would generally be completely acceptable for a monitor to not have built-in speakers. For a TV, not so much.
Ugh, opportunity to rant a bit. As of some iPadOS release last year, I can no longer connect my iPad to a monitor while simultaneously using Airplay to send audio to my HomePod. I assume this is a DRM-imposed bug, but it’s frustrating as hell.
I finally bought a cheap speaker with a 3.5mm input because none of my existing Bluetooth speakers have one, so I could plug it into my monitor, but it’s crappy audio and a crappy workaround for a crappy limitation.
20 watts standby is only about 14.7 kWh per month. Even at on-peak, summer PG&E rates, we're only talking about $7/month. Granted, I'd much rather pay $0 than $7, and I'd rather not waste energy, but we're probably not talking about anything close to the amount of energy the average household wastes. I'd be looking at refrigerators and other large appliances for energy savings long before I'd be thinking about how much electricity the TV uses on standby.
That's 20W and $84/yr to do absolutely nothing. There is absolutely, positively no reason the standby power draw needs to be that high. I'm fine with like, 100-1000mW to allow whatever background circuity is required to wake up, but 20W is absurd. That's enough to reasonably illuminate a bedroom (your average 100W-equivalent LED bulb is 14-20W).
$7/month is a really high amount. Especially for nothing. Or something I actively don’t want.
I have lots of dumb devices in my house I don’t want piling on $7 so the manufacturer can try to earn $0.30/month in data fees. I have multiple TVs, a washer, a dryer, a fridge, a cryo tank, lots of things. I don’t want them to waste $7 each.
I am not. I am suggesting there are other savings in the average household energy budget that are more significant. Besides, even "waste" electricity heats a home in the winter, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds even.
I would argue the TV is the most wasteful thing you mentioned. The refrigerator, even if it is inefficient, still does it’s job by cooling food. That ~15kWh monthly to your TV to exist in an off state does nothing for your quality of life. It’s not like the energy is uses somehow charged the TV for future use, it’s just running internal systems that we have no insight into and most likely does not benefit us.
Say you keep the TV for 7 years, that's $588. You can get a 75 inch Sony Bravia TV for $1500. You want to pay 1/3 of the price of your TV just to power it while it is turned off?
Exactly this. More than 7$ a month leave my bank account every month on so many random things, subscriptions I forget to cancel, virtual machines I forget to destroy etc etc. I'd rather have my TV shutdown / turn on quickly over sweating about a random $7 savings on an electric bill that I wouldn't even see anyway.
you don't need to be put into a financial crunch by the $7 in order to see it as wasteful, and it doesn't take 20W of energy to get a television to do things quickly.
we're in this sorry state of affairs because of people accepting lower quality without protest, while expecting everything to be cheap. Companies are in a bad spot, and so are consumers.
Demand doesn't really drive supply, not the way we're told it does. The manufacturers want to make devices that give them a further income stream, and they just have a marketing budget for making sure demand doesn't drop too low for what they're making.
> A smart-but-disconnected TV can meet all of those functional requirements
I agree. The question should be "What TV doesn't force smart features upon me" instead. I've had an LG Smart TV for four years. Never connected it to the internet, only use it with Apple TV and PS4. I notice none of the issues that GP mentioned.
I bought a TV recently and "didn't connect it to the WiFi", but guess what it does? If can't connect to the internet for a certain period of time, it desperately wants to display a "Internet Connection Error" message that puts the entire display into a state where CEC doesn't work, so the whole damn thing is useless.
I am frankly surprised they do not all do this, and predict they all will. There will be no "don't connect it to the internet" nor even "use a pie hole" solutions possible, because the manufacturers will intentionally block them
My TV is a 43" HP Monitor. Some things just don't work right. The Roku cannot turn off the display like it could my old television. Since the monitor has no speakers, I have to use a soundbar but the Roku remote cannot adjust the volume so I have to use two remotes. None of this is a big deal to me but it is not seamless.
I have a Roku Ultra LT, and the remote has an IR blaster. I have it control TV power and sound bar volume via IR just because it's more reliable than CEC. It is seamless for me. Perhaps you could upgrade to the higher end remote?
You may be right. I am on the Roku accessories page and it doesn't look like my remote is even sold any more. Mine is the voice remote with headphones but it does not have the two shortcut buttons.
I got the Roku Ultra LT back in November and I vaguely recall only spending $40 for it new. It looks like just the remote it came with is $40 now! Might be worth picking one up on eBay or something?
Children are complaining, but this is exactly right. Yes, I can work around the device connecting me to the internet. What I’d really prefer though is to exchange whatever cost went into the shit add ons, the Bluetooth, the speakers, the wifi, the usb, and put that into a better display. Done. I’m sure there’s a good business reason why this simple, obvious project is not what’s in the market.
I doubt it's actual nothing, rather I think the added cost in absolute value is used to improve operating margins in ratio. This would also drive internal incentives, and it's rendering the cost to the manufacturer irrelevant so long that the capitals at hand and market demand can absorb it.
e.g. $150 TV + $75 chips - $100 rebates = $125 -> negative cost and +10% margin to add chips!
And the problem is that we as customers are still charged the full $225, not the essentially nothing.
I do Bluetooth hardware for my job. At the scale that TV manufacturers operate at, I would be extremely surprised if Bluetooth cost more than a dollar for them to implement.
I operate on the scale of hundreds to thousands of units, and Bluetooth adds less than $5 to each unit. At millions, I assume it's more or less free.
Suppose economics of scale make it cheaper to produce the smart devices than the specwise-equivalent dumb devices, just like how it's cheaper to produce microcontroller-based electronics today than the "simpler" analog electronics which came before. Then what is the argument for the dumb devices?
A smart TV is a dumb TV with an extra processor. No matter how you shake it, the smart features are extra hardware added on to the dumb TV.
And besides, smart TVs are already much cheaper, because the manufacturer is spying on you and selling that data in perpetuity. They're injecting ads into your TV menus and keeping that profit.
Your smart TV is priced so low because it's subsidized by the manufacturer selling your privacy.
What you're talking about was a paradigm shift in the fundamentals of electronics. Silicon wafers in the trillions are cheaper to make than vacuum tubes in the thousands. It was a radical shift in the way the industry worked. It literally revolutionized the entirety of global society.
Meanwhile, Samsung took the guts out of the cheapest android tablet they could find and stuffed it in a TV. It's really not at all comparable.
In fact "dumb" TVs also need control circuitry for tuning, input selection, on-screen display, picture settings, etc., so isn't it possible that it works out to be cheaper to roll that control circuitry right into a more sophisticated microcontroller, which is probably produced in bigger scale due to its wider applications? And then, why produce a proprietary "dumb" firmware for the TV when you can just throw Linux on it?
I was actually pleasantly surprised to see the "just don't connect it to the internet" comments, as most of these smart TV threads are usually full of comments complaining about them on principle, even though most of the world doesn't care (connected to the internet or not), and in this case, I think it does solve most of the issues.
It's more common for HN to argue against something on principle, even when there's a relatively simple solution/workaround.
Not saying there's something inherently wrong with arguing against something on principle, but just saying that it seems more common on HN, and saying that the inverse is "such a typical HN response" is not my experience at all.
> It should turn on in seconds, not minutes.
I'm assuming this is hyperbole, but if not, I think there are other issues if it's taking minutes for even the smartest, most connected and loaded TV to turn on. Every smart TV I've owned has barely taken seconds to turn on, and I usually don't go out of my way to keep it disconnected from WiFi (unless, for example, I'm trying to avoid an update).
I have a smart TV (in fact, the very one recommended in the article), connected to a Sony sound bar, and an Apple TV. I wake the whole assemblage from sleep by prodding the Apple TV remote — and then it takes fully 60 seconds before I can use it, because it seemingly
1. Wakes the TV up in SDR, syncs with the Apple TV;
2. Starts playing audio;
3. Which wakes the soundbar up;
4. Which forces a re-sync as the TV switches to eARC mode;
5. And then the TV notices that the Apple TV is offering to negotiate Dolby Vision, so it does so, and re-syncs again;
6. Which kicks it out of eARC mode, so it needs to re-sync another time to get back into it…
And that’s all just if I left it on the Apple TV’s input when putting it to sleep. If I sleep the TV by sleeping a game console when it’s the only thing awake, and then wake it up later with the Apple TV remote, then there at least two more resyncs involved, and also seemingly ten seconds of complete blackness where it’s doing literally nothing.
Also, this one’s not the TV’s fault, but YouTube for tVOS gets so confused by these repeated mode-switch re-syncs, that if it’s what would be playing on resume from sleep, then instead the audio will play from the YouTube video, with the first frame of the video frozen on the display and the event loop stalled for another ~60s (I.e. my prompting to go into the task manager to kill the app is ignored, and then 60s later it suddenly happens, but at that point the video resumes so I don’t need to do it any more.) Doesn’t happen with any other app waking from sleep.
Oh, and sometimes the TV will just wake to its home menu despite being woken up by the Apple TV remote, and while the system apps will be responsive (once I grab the TV’s remote), it will refuse to open the input switcher, or the device preferences (in order to gracefully reboot it.) when it does this, I have to get up and unplug the damned thing to get it working again.
None of those things have anything to do with the TV being "smart" though, it's all up to the crappiness of modern HDMI.
Removing app support from the TV would not fix it. Actually, it sounds like using the smart features of your TV to watch video instead of an Apple TV would actually reduce the bugginess?
I have a 10 year old non-smart TV. It predates HDR, but just basic ARC and CEC still regularly trips it up. To the point my 5 year old knows how to re-select the sound bar output to fix when the audio breaks.
Ah, but most of the slowdown from this messiness is due to all these mode changes being handled at the application layer in sandboxed userland daemons on a non-real-time OS. Before smart TVs with application processors “fast enough” to (barely, slowly) do these things, the “control-plane logic” for a TV’s DSPs was handled effectively instantly by purpose-designed ASICs.
I suspect if you fully unplugged many smart TVs on the market, and then plugged them back in and turned them on, they'd take a minute or two (or more) to fully turn back on.
When you turn off a smart TV, it doesn't actually turn off. It's similar to a laptop when you close the lid and it goes into standby. Consumers wouldn't tolerate a several-minute power-up sequence every time they want to watch TV -- and rightly so -- so instead, they sit there, wasting power and money in a standby state.
Most of the world does care, they want their TV connected to the internet. They want to install apps and stream content. They don’t want to have to run a plex server and set up a raspberry pi hanging out the back of their TV.
> "just don't connect it to the internet" is such a typical HN response that completely misses the point. A smart TV with no internet connection is still a smart TV. It still has an entire operating system that needs to load wifi, ethernet, Bluetooth, usb driver stacks. It still has an awful, flashy interface that adds unnecessary steps between changing inputs. It still tries to load god knows what apps every time you turn it on.
And that’s forgetting that some of those, when not actively connected to any specific wifi network, will just connect, on their own, to any nearby open wifi network.
> 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 what you were watching at all time including porn even if it was streamed via your laptop, or reporting all the IDs of all hdmi devices connected to the tv, or scanning your internal network to find out what devices are there to then sell this info to advertisers and have you switch from Nintendo to Xbox for example.
Fwiw this was the first and last time I’ve ever worked in adtech, I’ve sworn to never ever enable this industry ever again.
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 to sell analytics that are “better than Nielsen”, real-time, across devices, and for ad (re)targeting. There were also plans to detect commercial breaks on broadcast tv and dynamically replace them with whatever ads samsung wanted to show you instead but I think this was scrapped after all.
While Ethernet over HDMI is certainly a thing, is there any chance of a TV actually doing that without a consumer jumping through several hoops? As someone who would actually like that as a feature, I am 100% sure my 4 month old TV isn't sneaking internet access through its HDMI connection.
No, the typical HN responses are the "just pay three times as much for a digital signage display because we're all rich Bay Area types here right" and the "Just use a really cheap crappy panel since we're all old curmudgeons who can't tell the difference in image quality anyway, right" ones.
"Just don't connect it" is the pragmatic option that normal people do.
I think we are all forgetting something here... Android smart TVs are just an android phone that is not pocket-able.... If all of us galaxy brains here stop arguing and made a crew to make ROMS for our TVs that remove all the spyware... the world would be a much much MUCH better place!
As someone who shares your concerns, as well as the privacy concerns, I got a projector a few years back and never looked back.
I'm not one to care too much about picture quality and all that so my $300 projector is the perfect device for me:
- Turns on pretty quick just has to warm up
- Fully dumb, no internet connection or crappy web UI
- Giant screen for me to see from anywhere comfortably seated in the room
- I just hook up my computer with HDMI for steaming, nice speaker hooked up with 3.5 mm audio
I have a TCL and the factory firmware was out of date and apparently was affecting the picture quality in negative aways. My options were: 1) connect to wifi, update, then disconnect and trust that it's been done or 2) load the update onto a usb stick. I went with #2 but they could just remove that option in the future if they feel it's interfering with their ability to mine data off customers.
PS. the update fixed the picture immediately beyond what I was able to achieve by messing with the exposed configs
meh, i think your response is more 'typical HN'. Nether are more correct than the other, but if you're annoyed or distrustful of all the internet connected factors of a TV, just don't connect it to the internet. I think that's a fine non-perfect, pragmatic solution.
"Don't connect it to the internet" might work, assuming it doesn't aggressively scan for open connections every chance it gets, but if this becomes common it'll only be a matter of time until you're forced to sign up for an account at initial setup, and the TV starts refusing to function at all without an internet connection (or it's been more than x days without one), and searches for nearby bluetooth devices of the same brand which are connected to send your data through that internet connected device instead.
The only way to solve this problem for good is to regulate the industry, but failing that, the least we should do is make it clear we're not interesting in buying their shitty spying products by refusing to hand over our money in the first place.
Buying the TVs, connected or not, signals that you support them and what they are doing, and more importantly it makes doing the things they are doing profitable for them. It reinforces the behavior you're trying to stop. That's not just "imperfect" it's counter-productive.
> The only way to solve this problem for good is to regulate the industry
At a place like Hacker News I expect there will be people who have the technical know-how to make a non-smart TV, or even a modular, pick-and-choose, TV, and crowdfund it. At the very least.
Lots of industries that aren't tech-adjacent, or are very expensive, need regulation in order to stop particular practices from becoming universal trends, but TVs shouldn't be one of them.
there's one person in the comments here already who is trying to build dumb TVs, and if they do it, that'll be where I'm buying my next TV, but I fear that even if they are successful eventually they too will turn to spying and ad pushing, because companies will always make more money by doing so and if their own greed doesn't push them to do it, their shareholders will.
Sometimes, it will always be more profitable for a company to refuse to provide what consumers want. There is no price they can charge us that will ever beat charging that same price and also selling every scrap of our data they can on top of it.
If the skills and materials to construct a quality TV were common or easily obtainable, I'd agree that the smart TV problem would be something we could solve ourselves in our own garages, but I'm not convinced that's the case which means nearly every one of us will be dependent on someone else to build and sell us displays, and as long as that's true we'll be at the mercy of their benevolence and their continuing willingness to reject huge piles of easy money.
But your response confirmed the parent's part about missing the point which is that Smart TVs' OS is an absolute bloatware dumpster fire.
This isn't some silly /r/privacy - tier paranoia about not wanting being tracked by your home devices, though it's a reasonable concern to an extent.
It's just about the people who don't care about those shitty overpriced streaming services and just want to watch the news without having to wait 15 damn seconds for the thing to turn on or worse, having to be more than patient to switch channels after turning it on because God knows what is running on the background and the channel hasn't changed in over two minutes in spite of having spammed the remote already.
What it doesn’t solve is the friction and bloatware of the tvos. My Sony tv’s Android interface has unbearable input lag using its menus, so I inevitably leave it set to my appletv hdmi input.
Could the TV do everything the appletv could? Yep just worse and I can’t get rid of it
That applies regardless of whether or not the tv is “smart” - my current “smart” Roku TV runs great, and I had an old “dumb” Samsung that took forever to do anything.
Well-written software is what helps here, not smartness or lack thereof.
Personally I'm more concerned about power consumption. My current TV, when it is off, it is off. It sips a tiny amount of power so it can listen for IR signals from the remote, but that's it.
Smart TVs never really turn off. If they did, they would take too long to "boot up" and consumers would be frustrated and angry. They're more like a laptop in a not-too-deep sleep state when they're turned off. Another commenter mentioned their smart TV consumes 10-20W when turned "off". That's just gross. It should consume milliwatts, at most.
And yes, I know that there are things in my house that consume far more power. But I actually get something for that power. A smart TV that I will of course never connect to the internet gives me nothing for that waste while in standby mode.
It's hard to understand because a smartphone can wake instantly with a fraction of the idle power draw. Smart TV = dumb TV + smartphone chipset in many cases so, where is it all going?
Sort of the point. This tech is necessary somewhere for a lot of uses of TV panels. Make a panel dumb enough, cheap enough, it loses capabilities of displaying Netflix's highest quality or supporting Xbox Series X and PS5 or less a gaming PC.
It's not the response you're looking for, but I recently got an LG C2 and plugged in a Roku from day 1. It turns on relatively quickly, and Web OS stays out of the way. I do have it connected to wifi, though, so I do get the occasional prompt to update the TV's OS.
I was previously using a Sony LCD TV from 2015 or so. I originally bought it as a monitor, but it became the living room TV when we bought a house. While I originally liked the built-in Android TV, it aged poorly. The TV's hardware decoders have silicon bugs that never got patched around. Netflix stopped working after they deployed their new compression a couple years ago. The only way I was able to get it working again was by having a friend at Netflix file an internal ticket. All they did was add the model number to a block list so that it would fall back to the older compression.
The LG is a joy. It's been a very satisfying purchase. Honestly, the Roku might as well be the TV's built in OS. My 4 year old can reliably turn it on and launch Disney+ in 3 button presses. Also, I bought it refurbished with warranty on eBay for $1k; the only flaw was a couple stripped out threads for the table stand. I hung it on the wall, so well worth the $400-600 discount.
I've plugged in my Steam Deck as well. It's a little bit clunkier due to lack of CEC, but I am using a random Thinkpad USB3 dock I salvaged from a junk bin at work several years ago. I suspect a more modern dock would be flawless.
Maybe minutes was hyperbole, but my Sony Smart TV (to be fair, it's the circa-2015-ish one relegated to the bedroom today) is unresponsive to silly human concerns like "changing inputs" or "adjusting volume" for a good 30-40 seconds when it turns on. ("Please wait.")
To mitigate this, you can pick a certain 4-6 hours of each day (24h isn't allowed) during which it'll make sure to stay "booted" but with the panel off. Or if you don't enable this, you'll enjoy lower power consumption but have to deal with this foolishness every time you turn it on.
My smart tv is set to turn on and switch to the Apple TV when the Apple TV wakes from sleep. The tv turns on in about a second, waits for a few seconds, and then waits five seconds to switch to the Apple TV.
Same except mine goes black a few times trying to negotiate with the HDMI source. Whole process from turning on my TV to watching something on it takes 1-2 minutes.
None of them, because the Linux computer on TV boots up and goes to sleep immediately upon being plugged in, and is connected to an internal video mixer chip rather than managing the panel directly.
My "smart" LG TV takes almost an entire minute from when I turn it on to when I can change the brightness settings (because the auto brightness is entirely inaccurate). The whole menu interface is slow, clunky and the remote (which I'd since replaced with a generic universal one) has idiotic buttons for features I don't want and will never use, plus has a microphone. It's a complete train wreck. I also asked LG if I can turn off Wifi/Bluetooth hardware entirely and they said it's categorically not possible, obviously because the data from spying on you is worth more than they make on hardware.
So that OSD menu, you don't want it to be localizable or accessible with voiceover? No need for customizable picture modes, high quality 1080p to 4K upscaling, wireless surround sound setup, non-line-of sight BLE remote? Since you like to live off the grid, wouldn't it be helpful if ATSC tuner could get over the air program guide and let you record stuff you like to a USB stick? If not, well it's your life, but that's a pretty small market, not likely to have much choice or good price/feature ratio.
Uh… no, none of that, actually. What the hell? In fact, I actually don’t personally know anybody, of any technical level or age group, who uses any of the features you mentioned. So, maybe the market is not as small as you think.
> good price/feature ratio
When the features aren’t useful to you they don’t increase the price/feature ratio. When the features are anti-features, you could even consider the ratio to be getting worse…
I agree with what you are saying ideologically, but practically:
- Streaming services often work better with native TV apps than external devices, especially in regards to frame consistency and HDR support.
- The upscaling/interpolation ASICs in TVs are really good. Until very recently, especially on streaming services, PC and Android upscaling was not good.
Hence I dont really want a "dumb" TV/Monitor anymore unless I will never watch any kind of video content on it... mostly because of streaming DRM, which is also awful, but still.
I have Panasonic FHD LED TV from pre-smart era which I don't intend to change anytime soon for the same reasons you've mentioned and I also maintain a thread[1] on dumb TVs on my problem validation forum hoping that someone would point me to a good dumb TV which is available in my country.
On that matter I have nothing but praise to give about my Panasonic OLED display.
It is a smart tv in the sense that it has YouTube Netflix etc apps, but it’s working perfectly fine without internet access (it has local network only), works with home assistant, shows no ads ever (even if online), starts up in 5–10 seconds from button press to displaying the picture, has a dedicated remote button for switching inputs, and looks fantastic (OLED with tons of calibration options)
There are fewer and fewer non smart tvs that have a baseline of quality.
It’s reasonably easy to not turn on the smart features at all, and leave it possible for software updates for the photo, or other operational tweaks.
As for difficult input changes I haven’t about those in a very long time since a harmony hub or something similar can handle that and anything else needed pretty trivially. Smart TVs also come with apps that make input changes one click.
My smart TV (not connected to the internet) is just a monitor - it switches on, detects the HDTV signal, and shows it.
I'm not aware of any awful flashy interface (I think there is an advert for the manufacturer before it syncs to the HDMI connection - 4 big red letters). That's it.
Personally I can live with that. In fact I was considering getting an 8K version of the same to replace the 3 4k monitors I have.
As does mine when it's going from sleep to live. It takes a little longer from cold-start, and you get the manufacturer name, which happens at least once per year.
My older-generation-smart TV remote now has booby trap buttons that when pressed lead to apps trying to start for 15-30 seconds before timing out, because the TV is not network connected. They are some of the most prominent buttons on the remote, and e.g. right next to the on/off button. I'd be happier without them.
So the screen turning on taking a while on newer TVs is often attributed to smart TVs but apparently the …compression? used for sending TV signals of HDMI has a minimum information requirement meaning that it just takes a while to get a first image (according to what I heard from someone on this site at least)
You definitely deserve to be called out for dunking on HN stereotypes and then writing the most HN comment ever, I.e. lamenting about things that an even smaller number of people even care about, and conflating it for popular opinion.
Small number of people? You’re right, the average user doesn’t care about all of these details. They just care about the big picture they create, and how that’s terrible.
It also doesn't prevent some TVs from finding access points it can connect to, in which it then will entirely on its own. There's quite a few that'll do that.
TVs have decent built-in speakers, a remote, probably more inputs, antenna/cable tuners, and a focus on large sizes, while not being so optimized for low-latency input.
> It should have exactly as much processing power as is required to pipe an hdmi signal to the panel and nothing more. [...] I'd even prefer it not have speakers.
I mean it needs a tuner to actually qualify as a TV. The bit about latencies and form factor, as well as the pricing for such, is also critical. As is the remote.
If he truly doesn’t care about any of those things, then I doubt he’d be here complaining about it. So imo at least some combination of the above is implicit.
I respect the many reasons why someone might want to not want a smart TV, but honestly, data collection isn't one of them for me personally.
If I watch a show, I'd be thrilled if somehow that information makes it into the data at the disposal of whoever has the authority to cancel or renew it, or to greenlight something new from those creators. The worst part about TV before streaming was that the few hundred "Nielsen families" at any given time, with either diaries or special TV-metering boxes, were the only people whose viewership actually counted.
(but also, I'm one of those unspeakable monsters who would rather get targeted ads for things I'd like versus the mass-market ads for Ram Trucks, Budweiser, Verizon, etc).
- the shows we were really engaged, and made an effort to be vocal still didn't flourish. Because guess what: the target market was middle age women at home, so strongly signaling we were in it wasn't helping.
- the more targeted the ads, the crappier the experience was.
We're leaving this with youtube now, ads often fall into domains I know lot about, and I know they're mild scams or sub par offerings that are trying to gain market through brainwashing, as their competitors are gaining shares through word of mouth.
I'm currently getting flooded with Adobe Photoshop ads, and god no I don't want to give money to Adobe.
My smart/non smart TV is my Android phone and my Android tablet with TVH Client, connected to TV Headend running on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a TV hat, which streams the signal it gets from the antenna on the roof of my house. I can probably send it to my smart but disconnected tv with an HDMI cable: I could use an old phone, no idea how to change channel from remote.
The result is that I can carry the TV with me, no ads except the ones in the TV broadcast. If you do that, wire the Raspberry to free the spectrum from its signal to the router. Only the phone will talk over wifi in that stream. It improved dramatically the quality of the stream. There are probably TV dongles for Raspberry alternatives.
I have a similar yet more exotic need. I one of the dozen of people that really enjoys 3d content. I have a 40inch LG from about 2013 that suits that need, but have been looking for something bigger.
Anyone who's been to Vegas in the last few years know they have pretty decent passive 3d screens (a la Nintendo 3DS) albeit with strict viewing angles. I dont mind something with polarized glasses for viewing as it gives a bigger angle. I just cant find anything on the market. There it seams are a few high end projectors, but my viewing needs are not that big and the room gets a lot of light and would like to be able to have it on during the day (in non 3d mode)
We use one of these for our TV, I also use one for both my offices.
They're great, they have a bunch of inputs and let you do cool things like picture in picture and multiple computers displaying to the same monitor, tiling, etc.
I've not dug into details if they are actually all non-smart TVs, but perhaps I should. Ability to cast to the damn thing easily from a phone is really nice, though.
Sorry maybe I'm missing something. A lot of the TVs are based on Android. LineageOS was able to remove the bloatware and create custom ROM for phones, what makes it so difficult to create similar custom ROMs for TV?
Also related: you can get parts called "scaler boards" which will let you dumb down any smart TV, and you can choose the degree of "smartness" from very basic "inputs only" like a computer monitor, ones with built-in media players, and if you really want, streaming via WiFi and the like. Here's an article I submitted on one a while ago (use archive.org to view, due to linkrot): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24877363
Get a Pi sbc of some sort, install an OS you trust, run Kodi on it, and only ever use the TV to display that.
Streaming services, YouTube etc, are available as Kodi addons. Though it's a bit of a hassle to do l the first log in to your YT account, these days.
Never use the "smart" features of a TV, which are basically data harvesting to subsidise the cost. Never ever tell your TV the wifi password.
1) Most projectors are not smart, so it solves that problem.
2) You don't have a gaping black hole in your living space urging you to be sucked into watching it. I despise TV and mass media and what it has done to our society. A projector at least hints at film being more of an art form that can be appreciated for its own sake. You have a movie night, you set everything up, you pack it up when done. It's intentional, it's not just "I'm bored, let's scroll through Netflix and find something watchable".
The spyware and apps are revenue features for the manufacturer. They help subsidize the price of the set. So get a TV with all that bloat for best value, and just keep the device off the net.
Classic style, simple functionality with endless ability to fine tune all the parameters.
Essentially a studio monitor. It should become the standard for color and picture by which everything else is measured. If it can effect the picture, than there should be a setting. The utilities interface should be straight forward and burned onto a raid level 4 array of non-volatile memory. And it should never ever need to be updated. The silicon should fail before I ever need to buy another Tv.
I’m actually surprised Smart TV manufacturers haven’t been sued for their data collection practices or legislated against given the privacy implications - at least in the EU.
Wow, super frustrating that this article, instead of actually listing options for non-smart TVs, just brushes them off with saying that they'll be "missing features" you would want, then lists features plenty of people don't need.
Thanks for essentially nothing instead of actually answering the question, Wirecutter.
Go to a thrift store and buy a dumb TV. I bought a 32" dumb TV at the Salvation Army for $60. It's not a flat screen but is only 2" thick. It plugs into HDMI for my laptop and Nintendo Switch, has a nice (dumb) remote for volume and brightness, and has worked wonderfully for 3 years now.
The TVs have gotten a lot better in the last 10-15 years so even basic ones work great. I would have been thrilled to have this TV as a kid.
Since none of the 451 comments (so far) have mentioned this, another alternative is to buy a LG smart TV and then root it with https://rootmy.tv
In addition to giving you a homebrew channel with lots of useful tools, it also removes much of the tracking and advertising "features", making the TV behave more as should be expected.
To be fair, the minuscule amount appliances use while in sleep mode is a rounding error. At 0.15/kWh and 5W on standby, it costs a whopping 0.54/month assuming it’s on standby 24h a day for 30 days (ie you never watch it)
As an aside, if you actually want to ask the wire cutter random questions, you can check out the green bubble in the lower left here: https://askthis.site/nytimes.com/wirecutter
1. Planned obsolescence at the firmware/app level. Eventually, manufacturers and app maintainers stop supporting your TV. When that happens, you need to change the whole smart TV. Dumb TV + smart box means you can upgrade separately and at your leisure.
2. Privacy concerns. Smart TVs openly monitor your usage, which includes not only how you use the TV but also what you watch on it, and sell that data for marketing purposes. Often you need to agree to the tracking to get many of the connected features - for example, my TV demands that I accept data collection to use AirPlay. Locking features behind an EULA and tracking is crappy, IMO. TBH I don't know if Apple TVs are better, but I Pihole my whole home network anyway.
3. Bad UI and UX. Many smart TVs are a PAIN to navigate. Convoluted, inconsistent menus, menus hidden inside menus hidden inside menus, slow start-up speeds or even straight up slow UI. The added complexity doesn't really justify the extra features, IMO. Purpose-built smart boxes normally do a better job. And if you don't like the current UI, selling it and buying a new one is much more convenient that selling your TV and buying a new one.
LG used to had non-smart tv for hospitality/healthcare market.
All newer models has apps/calls home if you connect to ethernet (Even their non-smart line up). I was able to launch Youtube from my computer. I am assuming they may call home through HDMI.
I imagine you could find someone to sell you the panel from a Samsung or LG OLED with a custom controller in a bezel-less case for 10x what the commodity set cost you. But that's the issue -- it's a question of economics, not malice.
All smart TVs are dumb if you perform one simple action. When the terms and conditions screen pops up during the TV setup process simply select "No." Congratulations, you have a dumb TV. This is what I do and so far it has worked.
Do you check every setting on your phone/tv/pc after you boot it up? It seems very impractical to me.
As a user, I assume that unless I explicitly changed something, my setup remains the same. I used to be able to trust that manufacturers won't try anything too stupid, but at that time the cost in performance, gear and PR was sufficient and incentive to sell information on you was not as prevalent.
Late reply, but yeah the delays in switching inputs is pretty mind boggling. Especially when you need to do it straight on startup - it's SO sluggish on my 6 year old Samsung.
If the remote had hard coded input buttons instead of all the ones I never use, I'd be very happy indeed.
I think that the answer is projector. It seems that none of them are "smart", they offer great quality and have a longer life. The downside is mounting them, but it's a one time job.
I was going to make that exact same comment. I bought a JVC video projector (B-stock for a steep discount) and it's great, amazing picture on a very large screen and no wifi, data collection or anything, it's dumb as a brick :) (well assuming a brick that can do hdr tone mapping, etc.. :))
Like one with physical nobs to adjust channel and volume? Ebay should be good. Want a remote control and on screen menus? That's a smart TV. The difference is that the price of embedded controller to run built in UI and live guide is no longer any lower than one needed to stream Hulu. Someone also needs to develop TV firmware and Android development is much cheaper than creating new embedded UI from scratch. And Hulu will pay for having a remote button / prominent placement on home screen / actual new user activation on the device. So overall, you are getting a discount for having ability to stream directly from TV, even if you never connect to WiFi. Enjoy!
> Want a remote control and on screen menus? That's a smart TV.
This is factually incorrect. The defining feature of a Smart TV is internet connectivity. You wouldn't know it from the selection in your local Wal-Mart, but there are a great many TVs in the world, with flat panels and menus and everything, that lack the physical ability to connect to the internet. I have one hanging on my wall.
There is no commercial advantage to skip $5 WiFi module and forego easy upgradability, app placement revenues and a segment of users who want Netflix out of the box. At least for consumer products, defense displays without radios are obviously important. But they are going to cost you.
I’ve given into Smart TVs and it’s actually…good? I can only really speak for Roku and Amazon Fire Tv. But being able to search globally across all my streaming services is fabulous.
I recently found that new Sony TVs (which run Google TV as the OS) start up with the option to set it up as a 'Basic TV' or 'Smart TV' right from the get-go.
I feel like all these extreme measures to try and protect your privacy aren't really that effective and are a big inconvenience. I like using the apps on my television.
It says just don't set up wifi, but TVs could still connect to any available open wireless network it can find. It says to use an old TV and just use Roku or Google Chromecast but that just moves the aggressive spying and ad pushing to a box next to your new TV, so that it's really helping.
The only answer right now seems to be to use a computer monitor and those are increasingly becoming "smart" as well.
Don’t. You’ll pay more for a far worse product. Get the biggest seller from a big brand. Yes it’ll be a smart TV but you don’t need to connect it to the internet. You can use it like a dumb display.
I hear there are models that do nag about connecting, so thoroughly check reviews to see that’s not the case.
I have a 2017 Sony Bravia and the screen is beautiful but the Android TV is slow and fills with ads and apps I can't remove. I don't connect it to Wifi and instead connect it to an Apple TV.
A few years ago, I started getting artifacts from Netflix when playing from Apple TV. After researching, I found the codecs in the TV were out of date. I connect to Wifi and updated Android TV, and everything has been peachy since. Ideally the TV would come ready to support HDR10 or whatever but that was not the case when I made my purchase.
TL;DR - streaming requires codecs and the TV may need an update to support the fancy, 18-bit color the TV is capable of but wasn't available at the time of purchase.
No mention of smart TV's embedded planned obsolescence? If they stop updating the firmware, eventually the smart features and apps stop working as well.
idk why people are against Smart TVs. It's not like the vendors put a 5G modem on it and pay for the ads to be served to you themselves with their own internet.
buy your tv, don't connect to wifi. connect to your device of choice, done.
trying to avoid smart tvs is so silly, as you basically exclude nearly all of the good ones.
1. Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.
2. Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.
3. Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network.
4. Automatic WiFi connections. TVs might connect to open or partnered WiFi networks without telling the user. Hard to know without an audit.
5. Accidental WiFi connections. Settings menus might be unintuitive (or deceptive) enough to trick users into joining WiFi networks accidentally.
6. Future data leaks. TVs might be recording data and saving it to internal storage. The next owner of the TV could connect it to a network, and years of stored data would be leaked. Again, hard to know without an audit.
> Cost. I'd rather not pay for hardware and software I won't use.
There is no more a “smart TV tax” than a “Windows tax”. Smart TV manufactures make money via selling user data that more than offsets the $20 BOM for the smart TV components just like computer OEMs make money installing Windows crapware.
> Environmental impact. Unused and unwanted hardware is waste.
What unused hardware? When the built in smarts go obsolete, you buy an external device and connect.
> Unauthorized users connecting to WiFi. TVs are often in common areas. The settings menus have no authentication. So an unauthorized user might connect the TV to a WiFi network
That’s true and it was happening a lot when we first moved into our condotel (condo that’s rented out like a hotel when we aren’t there and we get half the proceeds) and when we stay in hotels. I bought a wifi to wifi bridge to have a private network.
Basically most of your criticism is resolved if you never use the wifi to begin with, and all apply to any hypothetical wifi enabled device you connect to a dumb TV, anyway.
Its because they're garbage. When a CRT from the mid 80's powers on, warms its tube up faster and switches inputs quicker than a modern TV, something is very wrong.
I'm pretty sure the NAND is degrading in my 2015 Sony Bravia, its bordering on unusable with its hangs, jitters and crashes.
I barely trust any manufacturer to produce consumer grade goods that actually do their job properly, the best way to get more stuff working right is to narrow the featureset and hope that they're not completely incompetent.
there are plenty of excellent (smart) tvs. it's funny to see people posting on here talk about how long it takes for their TV to power on. clearly if you're wasting free time on here optimizing seconds isn't on the agenda.
My TV is either off to save energy, or because Android has gone completely insane again and it needs rebooting.
If you do a full hard reset of my particular TV, it can't even run its own OOTB setup smoothly. Sony have got it playing some ambient chimes in the background, but the audio constantly breaks up and glitches.
Its got an 8 core processor and it can't even handle audio playback in a bit of the UI which should have had heavy QA.
I get that. the point is that turning a TV on, even if it took 30 seconds, is basically nothing given the amount of time you spend watching it. it's not the right thing to optimize.
do you know how long it takes to turn on an iPhone? you may have a stroke if I tell you.
Turning on a TV is something you usually do everytime you want to use it, and it's just plain annoying to have to wait.
The comparison to an iPhone is bad, because you rarely reboot it. Imagine you had to wait for the iPhone to boot every time you want to read some stuff on the internet or call someone.
Idk, my smart tv takes less than 10 seconds to turn on. If you had a dumb tv you’d turn that on, but how long does a smart dongle take? My Google tv takes about as long as my smart tv
I use them for information displays. Our "smart" TVs boot slowly, show dialogs, and then complain that they can't sense the remote near enough to them, requiring a reboot. All in all it's an incredibly frustrating experience for something that should require zero interaction.
So, you say you don’t know why people are upset with these devices, but people are telling you why and you’re just not accepting it. You literally told the other guy that he’s optimizing for the wrong thing, as if his priorities are somehow yours to determine.
It’s totally fine that you have different priorities and values than us, but that doesn’t invalidate ours.
What do you use your TV remote for? At my parents' house we have a TV and a cable box, each with its own remote. The only reason to use the TV remote is to turn the power on and off. All the other functionality is in the cable box remote.
Turning the volume up and down. Which leads to another point I forgot to mention: people expect TVs to have built-in speakers, but a lot of monitors don't.
"That is incorrect" wasn't much of a rebuttal. Computer displays usually look like shit for video content, because showing video content well is much more complicated than nerds seem to believe.
That is incorrect. A TV is a display panel optimized around a 10’ interactive distance. A computer monitor is a display panel generally targeting 2’-3’ at most.
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