You could “always” just get e.g. a Sony reference monitor , they’re like $30k for a 30". /joke.
I think part of the trouble with OLED TVs is that most content isn’t really mastered with such displays in mind. e.g. infinite contrast, are quite large relative to viewing distance, really fast pixel switching times… you just end up with all kinds of weird stuff like these wide panning middle of the day shots that have “motion judder” because they’re only 24fps but we’re not shot with an ND filter and used a lower end camera and faster shutter and it just looks weird. What some TVs let you do is insert black frames in between actual 24 contents frames to mimic some old school camera effects and fool your brain you’re in a cinema, at the cost of some brightness… it’s just a major PITA to make everything, or almost everything as it were look good.
I think the best you can do is stick to one of the “premium” brand TVs that aren’t as interested in watching you watching TV and don’t show ads… Like Sony or LG or similar and enable “true cinema” or “creator mode” or “director mode” or whatever is called that does minimum processing to make the content not look weird…
You probably want some processing if you’ll be consuming media and not actually using it as a monitor.
I have a 2018 Panasonic OLED that I’ve dialed in to look right for me and I’m pretty happy with it.
Pretty much all OLED TV panel silicon is made by LG (including in Samsung OLED TVs, not their QLEDs or mini LEDs but actual oleds which I keep forgetting what they chose to call). There’s differences in picture processing and OS on the TV, most chipsets inside are made by mediatek, and usually with OS updates you also get picture processing updates.
There’s 2 generations of OLED panel technology made by LG display and used by everyone else over the last 5 years. The second gen panels (of 2020 onwards) are more efficient and more heat tolerant - they use more power and are brighter. LG display still makes and sells both kinds themselves and through other brands. Sony went a step further than most and attached some additional panel cooling heatsink on their “master series”, and then changed the picture processing parameters and power circuitry to allow for same brightness but larger/longer exposures… but otherwise it’s the same second gen LG display silicon.
… if you want to spend extra money on a better TV spend it on getting one of those fancy Sony or LG TVs (I guess Panasonic don’t sell stuff in North America and I’m assuming you’re from there, if you’re from rest of the world they’re ok too - just a plain light sensor not a camera, Philips usually cheaps out on the chipset and pulls the same things with firmware that Chinese manufacturers do, and does no development past initial sale). I don’t know about Vizio or TCL.
…
Also, with a TV you don’t need to worry about widevine and 4k HDR10+/DV from various streaming services… although it should just work with an apple TV as well.
Just aim for a gigabit Ethernet into the TV, because blu-ray content can actually go past 100Mbps for periods of 10s … which is usually enough to exhaust ram buffers.
And be aware that not all TVs have all their HDMI inputs the same, most only have 2 full bandwidth HDMI ports because they all use the same 1st gen LG OLED display + mediatek chipset combo and slap random OS menu system and a price tag.
This is definitely true, there are very few movies that actually go all the way down to black in order to avoid clipping, which kind of sucks when you spend the big bucks for an OLED. And the big disadvantage of that infinite contrast is being able to see all the compression artefacts that they can normally hide in the poor dark performance of most displays.
The Omen x65 might fit what you’re looking for. It’s big like a TV but dumb like a monitor. There IS an Nvidia shield integrated into it though, it’s easy enough to turn off.
First of all if you are buying a tv or other tech say like printers or monitors go to rtings.com to look at their reviews as they by far are the best on the net. Easy to understand information and they even offer up their settings to get displays looking right. They have helped me buy two tvs for me and one for my mom plus an all in one printer and everything that was said as a negative or positive with the items were true. You will know what you are getting into if you decide to buy something after you look at their reviews there.
Second of all in regards to tvs specifically well let me say that you don’t need to use the smart features. I don’t enable them. Simple as that. Now as for a tv I highly recommend for the budget user that wants decent HDR and a great picture well get the following …
The tv is mentioned at the top or near the top of so many videos I see when talking about best budget tv of 2021. It truly was a shocker that a brand I thought would never end up in my home is staying in my home.
Please keep in mind that it is not just about “not using” or “not enabling” at least as far as analytics/tracking; I see no guarantees that marketing technology like Automated Content Recognition (ACR) is in any way limited to only content provided by the “smart” feature:
Currently, never connecting a smart-tv to internet is the only way I would feel remotely safe from tracking, and only if it were completely factory reset before selling or giving it away. I do not know how much of a tracking backlog the TV might cache for periods where it is disconnected from internet.
The trouble with this situation is that tracking information really only needs to be a few bytes; I can imagine a minimal scenario where the on-board detection engine merely spits out an ID, which is combined with serial number and timestamp+timezone. This kind of tracking payload would easily fit in an Amazon Sidewalk broadcast.
I have seen promotional material for cellular/mobile 5G/6G, where the idea is to further promote everything being IoT; if nothing changes besides cellular/mobile providers bringing down costs for low-bandwidth, machine-to-machine (M2M) use, it could become cheap enough for TVs to integrate a cellular/mobile side-channel to relay the collected ACR tracking data.
That might seem overly complex, and therefore unlikely, but it is certainly possible; part of the proposed ATSC 3 specification (potentially future OTA broadcast standard for South Korea & USA) is to use an internet side channel to deliver tailored ads rather than relying on one-size-fits-all OTA delivered advertising.
So I highly doubt that gratuitous complexity is off the table if there is the promise of tailoring/tracking/analytics for TV manufacturers.
Following this thread I am growing more and more wary about the future. When time comes to upgrade the 1366x768 TV, I will probably consider just a bigger PC display.
I used to be a big fan of projectors because the display size was worth the hassle of the noise and managing light in the room. And then TV’s got huge and cheap and I was completely done with projectors. Now maybe I’ll have to look into a projector again for my next main display just in the hopes that it’ll be the only way I can get one that won’t spy on me.
This subject made the rounds again on Hacker News, and someone gave an example of a business-targeted UHD TV that possibly could be without “smart” functionality.
Oh, so a few months ago I did what I said I was going to do earlier in this thread; I’d had enough of the image retention and broken backlight lenses on my “old” Samsung so I bought a 43" monitor: AORUS FV43U Gaming Monitor Key Features | Monitor - GIGABYTE U.K. It has all of the features of a high end TV that you’d actually care about (4K, HDR1000, 144Hz, freesync) and none of the tracking or latency-inducing “features” we don’t want. And it is a really nice VA panel too.
This is definitely the way to go if you want a dumb TV imo.
It does, but I’ve never used them. Gigabyte even market it based on its “space audio”, but I have a 5.1 system so that’s not really something that I care about. Like I said before, I think the death of CRTs ultimately killed built in audio on TVs. They technically produce sound, but the speakers built into every flatscreen TV I have ever seen have been terrible. You’d be pairing the most high fidelity, HDR, high resolution image with sound that could well be coming from a phone. All of my monitors have built in audio too, and while they’re terrible they’re sadly no more terrible than I’ve heard from modern TVs. I think it’s quite mainstream these days for casual users to pair their TVs with soundbars, and for people who want something more to go the full AV receiver route.
It may be a cultural thing too, but I don’t think over the air is quite as popular in the UK as in the US – certainly not like it was in the analogue era. I think the glacially slow rollout of digital TV back in the day (as well as the collapse of ITV Digital) caused most people to already have cable or satellite before they could get a reliable OTA coverage. I could get a Freeview box for OTA, but the main ISPs here are Sky, BT and Virgin, they all offer some cable TV options, and I am pretty sure that they all offer a very basic free TV package that comes with the free OTA channels. If I wanted TV this is the route I’d go. That, or I’d see what live TV I can just watch in browser considering it’s plugged into my PC. I think ultimately even if it supported OTA digital TV out of the box new standards keep coming in so often that I’d be pairing it with a set top box before long anyway, and if I really watched TV that often I’d just get a proper cable package from my ISP.
For me that lack of a TV tuner built in is also a good thing on the very slim chance a TV Licencing inspector comes to validate my declaration that I don’t watch live TV. In the last three years they’ve tried once when I was at work.
Why would someone who wants broadcast TV do that? IIUC BBC iPlayer, ITV Player and the like make cable obsolete. Maybe for metered internet it would make sense…
(Maybe I haven’t got a clue. I’ve avoided broadcast and cable TV all my adult life.)
In theory, the equivalent OTA signal could have higher bitrate than the internet broadcast.
I have no idea what the situation is, in practise, for any country or broadcaster.
Also, OTA on a dumb TV prevents anything from directly observing your viewing habits. The same cannot be said for video stream webplayers.
As an aside, dumb TVs came up in a question proposal for the upcoming Q&A:
Because you get all of the same channels that you get OTA, plus more, plus at higher resolution and bitrate AND you’re paying your ISP for it anyway, and it doesn’t involve installing an aerial on a building you likely don’t own in 2022. There are free cable services that offer just parity with Freeview, which is what you’re describing.
Perhaps, but that’s definitely not the case in the UK. At the very worst cable and OTA digital TV are equivalent. In any case like I said you can get Freeview 4K boxes that connect via HDMI if you want, it just isn’t a method of watching live TV that seems many people do in the UK. Most people just use Sky or Virgin. The former used to be satellite, but they’re pushing fibre now.
I think the TV licence is something that affects habits too. If you have to effectively pay a £12 per month subscription for “free” TV, the barrier to paying extra has already been passed so I think people are more inclined to pay for cable. The price for a basic Sky package is less than the TV licence itself.
You’re really looking for commercial displays, which are those used in hospitals, restaurants, and the security sector. They will usually be devoid of those features due to security concerns and the fact they’ll be driver by use-case devices.
Something that I’ve noticed more while watching things like LTT is how much more these “smart” features are now even making their way into screens for computers, which doesn’t make any sense at all. Hopefully some players will step up for consumer screens that just don’t have these features at all.
In the for what it’s worth category, I bought a Samsung QN65QN90B about a month ago. I never connected it to the internet and configured it to go to the last input on power-on. So when I turn everything on, the TV comes up connected to the last HDMI port. So far, it’s never nagged me about connecting to the internet.