Hacker News Reader

Comment by ListeningPie | Hacker News Reader

The recommendation for a commercial panel which avoids built smart TV functions is one I'm taking seriously. We have an Apple TV connected and use nothing else. Does anyone have experience or recommendations?

Here is a link to NEC's commercial displays https://www.sharpnecdisplays.us/products/displays#2

View on HN

Find the hospitality version of whatever you want from CDW (Samsung and LG do a lot of them, idk about Sony). They are designed for hotels and hospitals, and have the same picture quality but no smart stuff.

An example from Samsung: https://www.cdw.com/product/samsung-678u-series-55-4k-uhd-le...

Well that is a super helpful pro tip! You have just opened up a new world for me. Thank you.

These are cheaper?

https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...

Nice!

We use NEC E and P series TVs for digital menuboards in amusement parks.

Yeah....BUT those panels are designed for, more or less, static images in well lit rooms.

Things like contrast ratio, how well it does dark colors in a dark room or fast intesity refreshing (like 60Hz "fast") may be questionable. It probably also expects super consistent and clean power...some houses dont have that.

Sure you could make it a giant Dakboard with a giant static image and not really worry about burn in for years.

Ultimately. I went with a cheap panel from say costco and a roku on a separate vlan (so my overkill is a network that can do vlan segmentation). Ultimately the roku TV's can scan themselves to death and report that they are on a network with other roku TV's all they want. Or you could just get a cheap-o smart TV and hook up the appleTV (cost came into play for me). I do have some LG smart TV's, one died within 3 years already...Meanwhile my Samsung 55" Plasma from 2008 had taking a direct lightning strike that took out the others and keeps on ticking. (and resulted in the TCL roku and LG tvs being installed).

So all of that is to say. I just go cheap panel that i dont mind replacing. And just keep them isolated entirely.

I am planning to replace my existing tv from one of dell's conference room line once it finally quits on me.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-55-4k-conference-r...

The down ide is that they are up 25% in cost over 2019 but

Overall cost trends for anything electronic are going to be pretty weird this year given chip shortages.

The commercial displays are also awfully expensive.

https://frame.work/blog/in-defense-of-dumb-tvs was posted here recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273169) and concluded that Sceptre, an inexpensive brand sold at Wal-Mart, was worth a shot.

I bought a Sceptre based on a HN discussion a few months ago. Happy with it so far. It's just a regular TV.

I bet we bought the exact same panel, since I bought mine based on the same HN discussion. The Sceptre 65" something something? Very happy with it so far.

I have an LG 'smart' TV but I just don't use any of the smart functionality. I don't have any problem with it, it just defaults to the HDMI my GoogleTV is on. Sometimes the dog will bump the TV controller (which sits untouched on the coffee table) and it will pop up a menu for a second, but it goes away by itself. I haven't interacted with the TV itself other than to change the picture mode to nighttime in about a year.

So why go to the trouble of not having the smart menu stuff rather than just not using it?

I don't know. If you don't connect the TV to the Internet, really, what is it going to do.

Perhaps it'll hop onto someone else's WiFi.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...

Or include its own built in 4/5g modem.

Connect your media pc to it and fully control your tv software.

A nag every 5 minutes to do so, lags and slow startup time due to all the stuff running in the background and, to top it off, horrible settings menus as the actual picture is not the main focus.

My Vizio M55-E0 has a noticeably (much, much) slower UI if it's not connected to the internet, though it's probably just poor design rather than an intentional thing. Definitely never buying another Vizio, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com