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Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

I recently bought a new TV and did a little searching for dumb TVs before buying. It’s really hard to find a dumb TV. I learned that you can in fact buy a commercial TV that is dumb which seems like a good option.

I ended up going with a smart enabled Samsung TV and have not enabled the TV to access wifi. It wants me to agree to terms and conditions whenever I pull up the main menu. I’ve learned to ignore it but it has asked at least once without good reason to access wifi.

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This may be tinfoil-hat adjacent, but I have heard that the allure of advertising data is so high that TV manufacturers will program their software to connect to any open WiFi network in order to deliver their collected data.

By the way, your post is basically the article, except they mention Sceptre TVs, who specialize in making dumb tv panels.

If you connect to a black hole Arduino AP is it smart enough to detect that and roam to an open Wifi network?

Yes.

I mean, "smart enough" is "can I phone home? no? try other wifi" which is pretty darn simple to build. Even by accident.

So I advertised sceptre TVs here last year about this time. I’ve had one for a year now and I do not recommend it. The color recreation is garbage, lots of glare, poor upscaling, and basically it’s everything you would expect out of a $200 55” tv (or $380 75”, they are stupid cheap) . Also my TV has a line of dead pixels and sceptre seems to have forgotten about my RMA.

While I won’t replace it with an LG Cx series oled, I won’t be ashamed to pickup a hisense or Samsung when I eventually rage quit this trash

It’s worth noting that they sell very high-peice dumb TVs for over 2000$ as well now, so I’d expect those to have pretty amazing panels built in.

At that point it's time to open the thing up and rip out the antenna.

At some point, it becomes time to pass draconian laws against consumer-hostile practices like phoning home other than to perform the intended function of a product or forcing updates that change behaviour in adverse or unwanted ways.

I am reasonably sure that point is already behind us, but politicians are not exactly known for their tech savvy and timely regulation of tech industry.

You can't legislate morals.

What else is worth legislating? If it was in the manufacturer's short-sighted selfish interest, they'd do it. For everything else, there's customer action and legal action.

It's being done all the time, and it's exactly what legislation is for. Workers rights, consumer protection, EPA, outlawing child labor and slaves, etc.

There is already the GDPR, but it lacks sufficient enforcement.

This is a very relevant read (PDF): https://www.bundeskartellamt.de/SharedDocs/Publikation/EN/Ot...

Interesting report, thanks for sharing it. I think there are other significant dangers in this area beyond those it covers, but promoting a better approach to privacy and to security updates after purchase would at least be two significant steps in the right direction.

Have you seen the size of the antenna in your cell phone?

You're never gonna find all the antennas inside a product the size of a television. Some will be part of the circuit boards.

I did much the same and ultimately came to the conclusions that:

1) The remaining consumer options are on the low to mediocre end of the spectrum and don't have great picture

2) The commercial options are more expensive with mediocre picture, as they're intended for digital signage (24/7 full brightness), not movies.

Yeah those are the reasons I went with the smart TV kept offline. It’s a bummer that TVs now come with terms and conditions designed to monetize you and even though you own the thing you can’t control it.

Could you just do a computer monitor? They have an HDMI port so they will show anything you want. Downsides: no tuner. Not a problem if you don’t need one. No remote control. Maybe not much of a downside if you’re just watching using a streaming box. No sound. Not a problem if using a sound bar.

Seems a worthy idea if you’re concerned about tracking, but I don’t see this idea around so I must be missing a downside.

Yeah that would probably work for smaller needs but haven’t seen monitors at 65” and higher range

Dell sells at least 75" monitors. They do cost 10x as much as a similar size smart TV from Walmart though.

I'm sure i sound like a luddite but why does anyone need a 65" screen.

No one needs a TV at all so that argument is pointless.

Do people need a 15" computer monitor?

If instead of a chair-desk-monitor you're sitting at a couch 5 times further from the screen, the equivalent screen size is 5 times larger, so 75" for the equivalent of what a 15" monitor gives you at your desk.

Meanwhile to sit somewhere where a 75" TV in my living room takes up a corresponding field of view to my 27" PC monitor I think I'd need to knock a few walls and sit in my neighbours

Backwards. Not sure if it's the square of the distance but you do need more than double the size at twice the distance.

I am using a 65 inch dumb Samsung pc screen together with a Nvidia shield. 3 years ago I bought the screen for 1000 bucks. Nvidia shield remote also works with the screen and stereo tuner. For my it's the perfect setup. Rooted the shield to get rid of all non essential crap. No ads. Very fast. And Plex,Kodi, Netflix, YouTube and Spotify working perfectly.

A possible alternative, at least for people inclined to a more cinematic watching experience (which has its pros and cons), is to buy a projector.

A projector also makes an excellent second monitor, again pros and cons.

I picked up a 40” Sceptre “dumb tv” for $150 on Black Friday and added a Google TV Chromecast. The TV itself just does the bare minimum: turn on/off, sound higher/lower. Everything else is controlled by Google TV. By far my best purchase of the year.

I quite like our Google TV Chromecast too (I think that's the name, the new one with the remote). Our old Samsung from 2013 had a lot of issues, Netflix would stall a lot, and Disney Plus never even released an app for it.

Turns out it wasn't the WiFi like we suspected, the TV was apparently just poorly coded junk. It's smooth playing on the new device (apart from the time it crashed and needed a reboot). My only complaint is that it associated with my YouTube account but it's a shared TV, so the main screen has watching suggestions based on what I have personally watched and I cannot 'log out' of YouTube alone. This is annoying, but it's Google, so what is privacy? I guess I can make a new account.

Don't know if they are widely available or available anymore but the last time I bought a TV, I got a commercial display for digital signage which had no smart tv features. It just had a bunch of HDMI/av inputs which I used with game consoles/android TV box. The screen is not as great as latest TVs for home use.

Some people upgrade to a new TV as often as every two/three years. You just need to find them on gumtree just before christmas. Thats how I got my big dumb LG.

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