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Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge market for 'dumb panels', under the moniker of 'digital signage'. Nearly every major TV vendor has 'dumb' displays SKUs on offer in many different configs. The only problem is that they aren't always easy to get one's hand on, as they usually are sold through b2b channels instead of consumer-facing retail outlets.

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This might be out of date now, but 10 years ago I purchased a couple of monitors for a digital display. IIRC the monitors were more expensive because the screen wouldn't "burn" in images if left on the same image for a long period of time.

This is significant. Current OLEDs at full luminance burn in within 100 hours. The problem is mitigated somewhat by the variety of details displayed during typical TV programming, but if you use an OLED TV as a daily driver computer monitor or with a gaming system to play the same games for hours you will notice burn-in quickly.

I have an OLED TV and after thousands of hours of use, sometimes hundreds on a single game, there is no burn-in. However, I do not set the TV to full brightness.

Edit: I suspect an OLED digital sign WOULD burn in though as I imagine that content is much more static and displayed many more hours per day. I just wanted to make the point that I do not fear OLED for common consumer use cases.

Anecdotal but I had burn in on my LG B7 within a year or less of usage. Chrome and windows start menu button in the taskbar.

They are oftentimes way more expense, I'm guessing because you aren't subsidizing the cost with your data.

I think the bigger factor is that they are b2b, though certainly selling the crapware helps subsidize the consumer models.

More likely market segmentation- it's a lot easier to sell a panel to a business for $2000 than it is to sell the same panel to a consumer for $500.

There's regular dumb TVs around too, and reasonably priced.

Walmart's site lets you filter for "Smart = N". Sceptre and RCA are the main brands.

For example https://www.walmart.com/ip/RCA-65-Class-4K-Ultra-HD-2160P-LE...

To offer a non-walmart option, I've been using the Rtings table tool to find consumer TVs are potentially more respectful of privacy. Although I get the impression a number of sets aren't captured here (maybe walmart has some listed that Rtings doesn't), they are fairly thorough.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/table/53948

The trouble with looking at a "no ads" rating is that smart TVs can always put more ads in later: https://twitter.com/JobPlas/status/1235537095755739136

You could say "I'm not installing software updates" and be safe from ads as long as you don't need any bugfixes, but then you're also missing out on security updates. If you keep it off the internet maybe you're ok, but your TV might start connecting to a neighbor's wifi to give you more advertising.

And with a smart TV, in addition to ads you may also want to be on the lookout for Automatic Content Recognition: https://www.consumerreports.org/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smar...

I'd be much happier just not having a wifi antenna in my television.

I don't understand - every set listed on that page has a nonzero score for "Smart Features".

No, your average home tv is not designed to run 24/7. These Digital Signage Monitors are supposed to do this. Try running your average costumer tv 24/7 for half a year and see how the color & sharpness is. Also they are repairable (normally).

Sharpness? How does sharpness go down on an LCD panel??

I don't believe for a second that data is subsidizing anything. It's a revenue stream, sure, but prices haven't gone down as data collection went up.

Prices haven't gone down? So before smart TV's were a thing 70" 4K TVs could be had for $650?

That's the usual price drop as these SKUs achieved mass market and got economies of scale.

I worked at a company that was attempting to sell software to consumer electronics manufacturers as per the divx model - some of us remember when you couldn't buy a dvd player without that logo. But when streaming began to replace physical media, I was told that services such as Amazon and Netflix began paying to have their software in the devices. I'm curious whether that's still a revenue source for manufacturers.

Its even getting hard to find digital signage that isn't connected at this point. IIRC all the samsung stuff moved to having little fleet management computers some time ago.

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