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Comment by leokennis | Hacker News Reader

How are Samsung Smart TV’s garbage? I mean, they have ads and crap in some markets but so do all their competitors.

I have a Samsung TV which has great picture quality, decent design and plenty of useful options for a very reasonable price.

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In meant in terms of durability and quality. We used to by a lot of Samsung electronics (along with TVs) through employee discounts and the failure rates among the TVs are always high. So much so that we used to joke about that there is a "if condition" that some how causes the pcb to fail in first month after first year (TVs used to have 1 year warranty).

I mean, Sony also has a long reputation with similar issues — dubbed the Sony Timer

My perception of Sony is that they sell higher quality products. Sometimes only slightly higher, maybe not enough to offset the price premium if there is one, but I assume all their higher end stuff is top notch.

> but I assume all their higher end stuff is top notch.

From my unscientific sample, yes.

The Sony Master series of OLED TV's (e.g. A9) are IMHO, most likely the best TV you can buy at the moment.

I've seen them side-by-side next to high-end Panasonic kit, and whilst the Panasonics put on a good show compared to your average TV, the high-end Sony's are noticeably better.

The Sony firmware also seems to behave more consistently with HDMI auto-switching than the Panasonics. Sometimes you ended up having to switch manually on the Panasonic because whatever automagic was meant to happen didn't happen.

Samsung will give updates for a maximum of 5 years. So all the security holes or missing root certificates (for HTTPS connections) of the integrated browser stagnate after that.

Then you have to use a raspberry PI or some other mini computer to get the same use out of it. And then why use a "smart" TV in the first place?

For the built-in spyware.

I want all the smarts to be outside my display device. If my TV is acting smarter than what’s needed to do the HDCP handshake, I’m not going to be happy.

> If my TV is acting smarter than what’s needed to do the HDCP handshake, I’m not going to be happy.

I am not happy my TV does an HDCP handshake. My device should not enforce someone else's rules.

I’m not either (and debated rephrasing that), but at this point, I do want to be able to watch content that currently requires HDCP, so…

The latest series has an issue with stuttering when watching live TV, hundreds of pages of complaints on their own and other forums, and Samsung has officially replied that yes, the issue exists, but they won't fix it. I know at least 3 people who have bought Samsung TVs in the last year and they all returned them due to this very issue.

Sony and LG flagship devices also have the same problems. I've a bravia and our office has an LG c9 tv - the softwdre on them both is unusable. The problem is there's no other real choice in the high quality TV market, and the experiences are still better than before; having one remote for Netflix, prime, live tv and a sound system via ARC is such a huge improvement too.

Do they? I've had an LG CX for almost a year now and haven't had a single issue with it, the interface and all the apps are certainly super fast and I wouldn't bother switching to a dedicated device, everything built into the TV works fine. And it definitely doesn't stutter like the Samsungs do. Maybe the C9 had some faults in the firmware, but it's 2 generations behind now. What do you mean by "software is unusable"? In what sense?

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