Technology

So Sony is now the new RCA. This is a new low for the company. I can't believe that they are gone just like that.

Make a dumb tv and I’ll be a buyer

That's a shame. I've had very good experiences with Sony upper mid range/lower high end TVs. Their image processing is second to none IMO, they seem to use more powerful CPUs than a lot of other android TV makers, and their use of AndroidTV means I can trivially customise my TV in a way that I can't with lots of other brands (strip out ads, basically).

Shit, my oldest daughter moved into a flat with friends when she started uni not long ago, and took my old 2007 42" 1080p Bravia that I bought all those years ago. She hadn't even been born yet, and it still looks shockingly good.

This is sad news.

I used to have a TCL soundbar.

In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.

If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.

It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.

Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.

The worst thing about ‘smart TVs’ is that they advertise so many ‘cool’ features but most of them have less performant processors and less ram than my 2019 budget galaxy a series phone, and that’s very telling, you can’t even use their dog shit built in web browsers since everything becomes outdated after like a week, and the performance is so bad that the expensive Hisense tv my dad bought back in 2020 can’t even load Google properly.

I had a TCL phone for a bit about 10 years ago and it was the hottest piece of garbage I had ever touched in my life

The verge is a garbage paywall site now

Crazy. I have a Sony XBR 46” lcd that’s almost 20 years old. It still looks great for what it is (1080p and all). It was a top of the line tv back in the day that’s held its own for a very long time. It’s sad to see great companies/products fail.

Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/noqtk

Sony’s modern OLEDs are sick. There are a few between my family, and they have the best processing I’ve seen, they decode massive bluray rips no problem, and native options for a clean ad-free UI.

Why TF aren’t people buying them?

I went from Sony, Samsung, and LG to now buying TCL. At under $1000 for a 65", they're the best option.

Anything under $1500 I'd bet on TCL. Keep in mind TCL manufacturers a great chunk of the worlds LCDs that aren't just for TCL. Pretty sure they bought LGs LCD plants. Maybe Samsung too.

Their TVs have a lot of dimming zones. Sony I don't think makes LCDs or OLED panels themselves. At least one line of their TVs use TCL panels already. They buy from others

Here's a review for the model that came out last year. At this point where's it's regularly on "sale" for $1000. TVs are MSRP for like half a year and then the discounts always seem to me to be happening

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/tcl/qm8k

1,680 dimming zones in the 65" model and from what I've read, the global models are usually one year behind China. So in 2025 China had TCL TVs with even more dimming zones. 8 years ago sub $1000 65" with array LED backlight zones were like 100-200 zones. OLED were incredibly better and would kill off LCDs when prices came down. The density of dimming zones I think progressed faster than people expected

So TCL has solid image processing while Sony has great image processing but not so much better for me to think it's worth it. Same with the $1000-2000 mini-led backlit LCDs vs OLED. Yes OLED looks better. Don't feel like it's large enough for me to go much higher than a $1000 TV. That's a reality for home theater brands today. TVs, speakers, receivers/amplifiers, headphones, mics, etc - there's good stuff at low prices.

Everyone's competing on value now. There used to always be rumors about a Apple TV (actual TV) and Apple EVs. Never hear about rumors for those anymore. Don't think the quality difference possibility and profit margins exist to make those appealing anymore for Apple. Sony like Apple is increasingly a services/media company.

Samsung - Tizen sucks. I don't recall how LG and WebOS looks, but to me Tizen is leagues above Android and Roku in making your TV into a loud billboard. At least Android you can install a different launcher.

I remember when Sony was THE brand, not? Meh

TCL TVs are fine for the price, but you use a TV with more processing power than whatever hamster wheel TCL uses and you get real lusty real fast. Painfully slow, unresponsive UI.

Its funny because all these grand Japanese OEMs like Sony and Panasonic got undercut by Korean rivals like LG and Samsung in the 2000s, which forced Sony to move further into exclusively high priced devices and for many other OEMs to leave the US or global market.

Now TCL and HiSense are undercutting the grand Korean OEMs, which is slowly forcing them out of the low-middle end market.

I upgraded from a 20+ year old Phillips LCD to TCL's QM8K, and the display technology for being a QLED panel is astounding. It looks 95% like a high quality OLED for a fraction of the cost.

Only downside is Google TV (Junk Android that you have to debloat a bit) and for some reason the TV can't passthrough Dolby Atmos from app players like Kodi, even though it can do DTS-X just fine. I'm pretty sure the second issue is just a software bug, but TCL has been taking ages to respond. Pass through from an external source works perfectly fine though.

If you're in the market, I highly recommend seeing it in person at a hardware/electronics store. The side by side comparison is insane.

It's like when IBM left its PC manufacturing to Lenovo. And, probably a ton of other examples I've never paid any attention to.

It's starting to feel like only old people look at a screen bigger than six inches. That, combined with displays becoming a commodity item, leads to the manufacturing being abandoned to commodity manufacturers. If Sony could bring anything of value that would justify the cost of holding on to this, they would. Sony's name hasn't been synonymous with quality for decades now, that's partly their own doing through poor choices, but also the quality of cheap displays is perfectly adequate for most people.

The only negative thing about my TCL tv is that it's running Google tv launcher. I replaced that with Projectivy.

Besides the paywall.

It doesn't sound to me that this is making Sony go away from a market, it just sounds like they'll still be involved.