Now get rid of advertising on smart TV OSes
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
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Do not connect your tv to WiFi.
just get rid of Smart TVs in general. Go back to simple dumb TVs.
If I want smart features, I can slap a Roku or something else on the TV.
I had to go out of my way to find a dumb HD TV years ago. I don't know if they even exist any more.
Scepter is the only brand I know of that still makes Dumb TVs.
But the screen quality on them can be a real roll of the dice.
8k is pointless. I even rarely use 4k on my 65".
My 55" 4K OLED LG is the single greatest TV panel I've ever looked at. I can't determine any individual pixels, the blacks are black. I have no issues with it in the slightest. And I see absolutely no reason why any TV of that size should need 4x more pixel density (or whatever it is).
Not sure what the manufacturers were thinking, this chart has existed for a long time, you have to be sitting pretty close or looking at a rather large screen for 8K to make sense
What it feels like to look at a TV that's close enough to justify 8K:
Where would 1440p lie on this?
1440p screens are all monitors you sit 2-4’ from. That close you can justify a higher resolution but people pick 1440p for other reasons like frame rate.
Yeah, most people aren't within 6 feet of their TV, and most people aren't buying 100" TVs either. 8K is relevant for virtually nobody.
A lot of companies are successfully working on larger panels (I saw something about a 165" TV recently), so 8K may have a good place in a theatre room one day, but that still leaves you a lot of problems to solve first, and is far from mainstream until all of that becomes a lot cheaper.
We bought a 60" LG LCD first. It was too big for our living room, so when the backlight went faulty and we were offered a refund we chopped it in for the 55" OLED, which is basically perfect for our room.
Turns out 5" really can make a difference.
I am sitting within 6 feet of mine, well lying in bed really. The 50 inches of my TV are huge from that distance and it's still well within the 1080p zone of that graphic. And this 4k TV was already pretty cheap when I bought it almost a decade ago. I gave up watching 4k content years ago when I could not tell the difference to high quality 1080p content.
and then you have people like me who use 50inch TVs as computer monitors that sit on their desk.
Yea same. But I fucking DESPISE the LG remote. Holy shit whoever thought about putting a fucking trackpad as the main navigation element needs to burn in hell.
Yeah, it's not great.
Luckily, we do 99% of our viewing through an Apple TV, and we have a soundbar, so the ATV remote covers basically everything we need.
Doesn’t the Apple TV remote also have a trackpad as it’s main control?
To be fair, Apple's track pads are substantially better than the rest of the industries. Credit where credit is due.
Not the current gen. Well, it can act as a trackpad, but that's not the primary input method. The previous gen, however, did have a trackpad. Again, it could be clicked, but it was generally shittier. The current remote is actually pretty nice.
They might look better but they're too fucking expensive
Even if they were priced the same as 4K they would still be a bad value. Computers and consoles struggle with 4K 120Hz so 4 times the resolution is too much to ask.
8k is such a waste. Most content people watch isn't even 4k
For a lot of people most of their content isn’t even 1080p. Plenty of people watching DVDs and many TV channels only broadcast in SD.
Display technology has long outpaced content delivery.
Yeah, surprisingly DVD is still heavily outselling 4K bluray. Seems weird to me but I guess the players are ubiquitous.
New blurays are 30-50 each. New DVDs are 5 or less, each. Libraries usually have bigger dvd collections than bluray collections. People use what they can afford, not what is best.
Amazon has 3 for $33 sales a couple times a year. I just got Wicked (2024), F1 and Sinners in 4k for $11 each.
Also there's nearly 30 years worth of DVD content available, it's basically for the same reason why VHS still has a present following.
Well, that, and vhs is one of those things that is fun to play with. It's never going to be perfect, and that's enough to keep people like me coming back to see what new improvements I can make to my vhs setup this time.
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and a lot of movies aren't even sharper in 4k. Since for a long time movies used a 2k intermediary format for post production, even if the movie was shot with a 4k camera.
Early 2000s to mid 2010s movies shot digitally? Sure. Film shot movies, especially on 35mm or larger, absolutely look better in 4k. Especially when they’ve been restored from the negative and converted to HDR for a 4k release.
There’s a lot of older movies out there where the UHD Blu Ray is the definitive version to own, looking significantly better than any prior version (and will likely never look better).
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The only market for 8k is movie theaters and megatrons. It’s absolutely not necessary to have it in your tv in your house. And it’s also insanely expensive to get the proper hardware to drive it at full resolution.
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I’ve never seen an 8k TV but ignorance is bliss as I’m still rocking 1080 and happy. I do see the difference at 4k when at friends houses but 1080 still looks good in my living room.
2k is nice. 4k is pushing the limit of utility, even if you can get content for it (or play games with that resolution if gaming). 8k is beyond any need for any normal person. Maybe if you have a private movie studio you could use it, but I don't think that's what this is discussing.
4k's bump in resolution is nice, but the biggest benefit is the improvement in color (HDR or Dolby Vision).
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The majority of ppl watching a streaming service with shitty res and crappy compression would do fine on 1080p
I agree. My Plex server is majority 720p with decent bitrate with a lot of 1080p with decent bitrate and a tiny amount of 4K with subpar bitrate (otherwise it’s too large). The 720p is noticeable on the big screen but good luck spotting between 1080p and 4K. It might be different with full 4K Blueray rips but I’m not using 50-80Gb per movie.
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