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Comment by analogmemory | Hacker News Reader

It's on my "smart TV" and there's a 50/50 chance that when I turn on the TV it crashes. On the plus side it's helping me stop watching so much TV.

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This sort of thing is exactly why I'm very unwilling to buy a smart tv. It's getting harder to find decent dumb ones, though.

LG's WebOS is surprisingly solid. I was all set to use my TV as a monitor and plug in my Roku for the "smart" bits, but I abandoned that idea shortly after I turned it on for the first time.

I went from an LG with Google TV to an LG with WebOS and I was seriously surprised at how much I liked it. For fun I plugged in a mouse into the tv and even that worked great. They actually made it a first-class option for input. The UI overall is responsive and looks nice. I'm pretty happy with it.

Why not just get a big computer screen?

Pixel densities, and price are major factors here (computer screens being far more expensive per inch than a TV).

Computer screens are meant for sitting very close, and TV's are meant for sitting back aways... so the viewing experience will be "off" a bit (due to pixel densities) if you use either for the other purpose.

Also, most computer screens don't have COAX inputs, usually only have 1 HDMI input, etc...

Eh, what would a 50" TV do with coax?

Receive ATSC or QAM TV.

Receive over the air channels

Nobody makes an acceptably priced 40-50" computer screen that I can put in my living room.

Dunno, Iiyama has a decent 40" 4k for 400-500€ that does the job for me.

I need almost double that size unless I want to watch TV like a peasant....

Oh, huh, hadn't seen that before. That's actually an option, potentially.

Why not a projector?

Because I don't want to close the curtains (actually, I don't even have curtains currently, but assuming I did) and make the room dark whenever I want to watch TV.

Fair enough, but most HD projectors are > 3000 lumens (and start at ~400 USD/Euro) which is generally sufficient in daylight.

Vizio E series? Mine does the same thing. Powers on, sits for 15 seconds, then a "cannot connect" message that cant be fixed by anything other than turning it off and waiting it out.

Yes! I have a Samsung Vizio. So it's not just mine. When I turn on the screen, there is an 80% chance that the TV can't connect to the internet. I have to switch from the most-recently used app to another and back (say, Netflix to Amazon to Netflix) to force the TV to kick start its internet connection. It seems like the TV or its apps get stuck in some idle mode when the screen is off.

I thought Vizio was an private brand not related to Samsung.

Samsung and Vizio are completely separate entities.

Yep. My bad. I knew my Samsung TV runs Tizen but didn't know if it was a "Vizio" model [sic]. Assuming we were still talking about Samsung TVs because the parent article was about Samsung's Tizen OS, I searched for "samsung and vizio" and saw some images that looked like my Samsung TV. :)

No Samsung. I half jokingly says it's because it's been compromised by the CIA (Which doesn't sound too far fetched now) :P

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