I hope we’re not paying more for a player that does less…
You are and will be, as the cost of hardware in “smart” devices (and the reason that non-smart TV’s no longer exist) are subsidized with on-device advertising and massive data collection/reselling.
Yeah. Part of me wonders how much of a premium that making a TV dumb would be and if there is a large enough market that would buy into it.
Why not purchase one subsidized by ads then just not connect it to the internet? Seems like a win-win
…because there’s no guarantee it will work without internet.
Can you provide an example of one that only works online? I have never heard of that.
I’m not sure we’re there yet, but we’re certainly in the “nag banners on a frequent basis” realm on TVs. Not technically unusable, but practically unusable.
Fair, but I don’t think we should want to pay a premium for a dumb TV in fear of a hypothetical future. Perhaps worthwhile if it ever happens, but until then buying a subsidized smart TV and keeping it dumb seems fully better to me.
Disagree. You have to vote with your wallet. It’s not like the manufactures aren’t going to continue down the road they’re on. The only thing that will stop them is losing sales because of this crap.
They already exist. You just have to look for “signage displays” or “commercial TV’s”, they come with all the smart crap stripped out.
Iiyama screens are some of the best commercial screens. Unfortunately commercial screens usually lack the plug in and play features on domestic tellys, which can be a right faff
Plug and play features like…
Plug an HDMI cable in and watch?
I’d imagine they mean features like HDMI CEC, input-based picture mode memory/adjustment, support for high-quality audio (like Atmos), etc.
My number 1 requirement is being able to disable HDR, my sets don’t implement it correctly and HDR content is unwatchable because of it.
The only fix is to disable it on the device as the sets don’t have that option.
Now I’m genuinely curious: what if you get a super-old and cheap HDMI cable? I’m talking like HDMI 1.2 or 1.4. What are the chances that your tv will be able to process whatever resolution video but not receive enough information to interpret HDR?
Or, it’ll likely be more like running gigabit from a cheap router over Cat3 or paired Cat1 where the high frequency generates so much noise on the low-quality unshielded twists of cable that it struggles to assign any standards and you end up with nothing.
The cable would still need to do 4K though…
I think 1.4 does 4K @30Hz. Anyway, I could have sworn most TVs have the ability to turn off HDR, or at least have picture modes incompatible with HDR. Loophole, baby!
Yeah, Samsung not so much. The non-HDR picture is vibrant and gorgeous. The HDR is dark, muddy, and unwatchable.
Fortunately all the devices I have feeding them have the option to disable it.
Example:
HDR On:
HDR Off:
Leia eye rolling HDR in the top pic…? 😜
