This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
if you can't tell the difference between a nice OLED and an average LCD then you need your eyeballs checked.
I can tell OLED and regular LED or LCD apart, but that type of improvement never seemed worth it to me. Maybe I should have checked out some specific content on it, but OLED never really blew my mind.
that's perfectly reasonable, everyone will have a different cost/benefit calculation. But that's a lot different than saying expensive TVs aren't actually better.
It’s not just about oled vs lcd. There’s a huge difference between backlight arrays in cheap lcds vs expensive lcds. And there’s still benefits to choosing lcd over oled. Either way, some people just don’t care about image quality. I have a friend that claims he still can’t tell the difference between dvd and Blu-ray, or 4k Blu-ray.
sure, it was just an extreme example. the point is the article is nonsense.
It might be kind of helpful for like a portion of the population. Maybe.
maybe if they said "expensive TVs are not worth it for some people" but 1) that's not what they said, and 2) that's obvious and doesn't need analysis anyway.
There’s plenty of people in this very thread who are super proud of their 7 year old $300 nameless small tvs
The people:
Expensive large screen displays are better.
Smart TVs are privacy invasive billboards that let you watch some TV on their terms.
Now you got me thinking of the potential of a modded smart tv
Funny; that’s where my mind went too.
TV equivalent of OpenWRT?
They’re a little bit better if you just never connect them to the internet.
I opened my smart TV and removed the Bluetooth/WiFi PCI card that was inside it.
Good fucking luck connecting to something you privacy invading piece of shit.
chad!
This just doesn’t seem to click for a lot of people for some reason that I cannot explain whatsoever. I don’t even have mine connected to electricity when I’m not using it.
Mine gets put in the garage when its not being used. Microphones to record you can work on battery power inside the tv
I keep mine chained up in the basement when not in use.
I'm picturing a big screen on the old school TV carts.
To be honest, I recently got a TCL Roku TV and I almost gave up on trying to use it as a dumb TV. I'm not a beginner at this, but setting up a network connection was so embedded in the initial setup, from the moment you turn the TV on. I did a couple factory resets and I could not figure out how to bypass it. Turns out I had to set it to "store display mode" at a certain point and then connect my other streaming device.
Yeah, the Roku OS is REALLY baked in there and REALLY wants your data, and they recently updated it to make it even harder to circumvent. The trick is to just block its connection at the router level.
Exactly what I did. I'd get a 65" monitor if there was any. But an always offline smart TV will do.
Even then you still have a bunch of cheap hardware crammed into an insufficiently ventilated box that will lead to problems down the line.
My TV is 15 years old, not very smart, thick as oatmeal, but works like a charm.
you don't have to use the smart bulllshit.
I’m not worried about me using the smart bullshit. I’m worried about it using me. Beyond the ones that literally spy on you through camera or microphone …
A few years back I started to see descriptions of media recognition, so a tv could know what you’re watching even if it’s not through one of its apps. While I have no idea how widely that’s deployed, it’s awfully dystopian. There’s a specific reason to keep your smart tv off the network, even if you never use the apps.
I’ve also read articles (not sure if legit) about smart TV’s piggybacking on other networks, such as using WiFi even when you disable it, or picking up your streaming devices network over hdmi
you can opt out of all that stuff. They bury the options deep in the settings but you can do it and it works.
While there are usually options to opt out, past behavior has shown that manufacturers can’t be trusted. It starts with opting you in by default, and trying to trap you into one sided terms of service that you can’t even see until you’ve “agreed” by opening the box. However most manufacturers have been caught ignoring these options in the past, so we have no reason to trust they won’t again. Especially here in the US where what little consumer protection we used to have is being shut down
It's still there, though.
And since it's usually one integrated board, a failure in the "bullshit" will likely affect the not-shit.
I'm still rocking a 2011 38" vizio from Costco. Does everything I need, nice and dumb, as a TV should be. A bigger and higher def TV won't bring me more happiness, so I'll be sticking with it until it quits and I can't fix it.
I just had similar I gave to my kid. OLED was a huge upgrade. My new TV is much higher contrast, much smoother, more detailed, especially in high activity scenes
This assumes that the reviewer who gave the rating wasn't considering value as part of their scoring. I'd expect the reviewer to be scoring a TV based on his good it is compared to similarly priced competitors, not comparing to every other TV on the market
Rtings.com scores do not include price as a factor. Scores are calculated by multiple test results.
I bought a Roku smart TV 65in like 5 years ago. Light as a feather and never gave me a minutes trouble. Think I paid like $300 for it.
I’m in the same boat, bought a Samsung 40-something-inch smart tv for around $300 maybe 6 years ago off the neglected “small TV” aisle. It has some bloatware, but it’s never been an issue after configuring a few settings. I’m guessing if I went for one of the floor models, it’d have been a problem.
I'm not an "imagephile", my eyes can tell the difference between 4k & 1080p but for a 45 min TV show I couldn't care less if its in standard def.
We have an HTPC handling all media including TV recrdings so I took a USB with a few media files of differing qualities & tested them on TV's in the store - no way I'm buying a TV without seeing how it handles everyday stuff that isnt the ridiculous over bright awful motion smoothed in store demo scenes.
I'd never use the "smart" features of a TV, that thing is never going online.
Last 3 TV's have been Panasonic. One of them was a lower priced set but still fantastic picture. Not the best UI & to be honest a nightmare menu system but excellent panels & no ads or BS in the UI.
The way the tech overlords are heading I'm not looking forward to replacing our set when it eventually needs it
