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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Same with TVs, please. I can't find a single OLED on the market that doesn't have Android or some shitty Samsung OS installed on it.

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I highly recommend TCL TVs. The remotes are super simple (with just the buttons you need), the UI is straightforward and you never have to connect to the internet. I’m on my second panel, only because I wanted to downsize from 65” to a 55” when I moved, and connected to an AppleTV it is a dream to use.

Edit, to add: the OLEDs aren’t to market yet… but they’re on the way!

All of their products appear to be "smart". Why can't they just make a TV that is... a TV?

They may be labeled as smart, but they’re not nerfed at all if you don’t connect to the internet. And there are no notifications or interruptions trying to get you to connect. You can even just hook it up to a set of rabbit ears and set ‘antenna TV’ is your default mode and every time you turn the TV on it’ll go right to over-the-air programs. I’m a big fan, obviously, as I hate smart devices.

Edit: grammar.

Because society wants smart TVs. You and a lot of people here don’t, but collectively, people like the idea of having Netflix/Hulu/etc right on their TVs. The cat’s out of the bag now. If you/me want a dumb TV, don’t look at consumer TVs in BestBuy, but expect to be spending over $1000.

Does society really want that or does it not realize that it doesn't have to be this way?

The alternative is a separate box (or something like a Fire Stick). But those became less of a thing once TV manufacturers started implementing them inside the box. And with that, it’s one less thing to buy (which consumers like).

If you tell customers that two TVs are identical except one doesn’t need a dongle for Netflix and is cheaper, they’ll choose the smart one.

That may be true, but you only need a ~10% share of the market to want a privacy-first (i.e. dumb) TV, and that'll at least keep the others in line. Sort of like the role Mozilla ought to play in the browser market.

They do... It is called "monitor".

Monitors and TV encode signals much, much differently.

They used to. Do they still?

yes, if you want to watch broadcast channels on a monitor you will need a tuner/amplifier converter box to do so

Are those tuners full of bloatware, ads and telemetry like Samsung's or android TV's?

Please, explain.

How long does it take to turn on and start displaying the input video?

There was a previous HN thread where someone said they were attempting to make a dumb TV (a commercial endeavor) and others here said they were interested in working on that. I wonder where that effort is. Feels like there is a ready market for this product. I can't turn on my Vizio without it taking 10 minutes to check for updates, changing inputs take a minute. The Samsung keeps trying to update YouTube and some other apps which I've deleted hundreds of times before, there's probably 30MB of internal memory left. Nothing turns on instantly. More and more I feel like nothing I buy is ever the thing I really want, it's always a devil's bargain with the least-bad thing I can live with. Consumer-focused software, is that even a thing we make anymore.

Per chance, do you have a link to the thread?

I'm searching for it myself. There's been plenty of venting about "smart" TVs on HN in the past year. The fellow who wanted to start the project said he had a background in electronics, I should have stickied that thread.

I went with WebOS, so far the best of them, meaning the less painfull one.

WebOS is by far the least painful, but by no means good. You can disable some of the crap, but still it occasionally injects ads and other crap on top of the broadcast.

Nothing a well-configured pihole can't handle, but when I found out a $1700 TV is that awful I was livid.

I learned to live with it, considering how bad the Android TV alternative is.

It has become really hard to get a proper dumb TV, if they aren't using the well known OSes, they bundle some custom firmware that also pretends to be smart anyway, most likely using some FOSS POSIX OS.

I have an LG TV with WebOS. The OS is fine, but the CPU is underpowered and has difficulty streaming video.

Yeah that is definitely noticeable.

I usually describe my "smart" TV (and all of them, really) as a bargain basement smartphone with an incredibly nice screen. All of the same issues - bare minimum specs to operate the thing in a typical fashion, lack of software patches and bundled "apps" that stop getting updates after a couple of years, questionable privacy policies, etc.

Have you looked at NEC commercial displays? For example:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1629170-REG/nec_e438_...

I've considered getting a monitor-style dumb display for my next TV, but the issue is that none of them have an inbuilt TV tuner. I get pretty fantastic reception at my current place in Queens and I'd hate to give up all my OTA channels and switch to something like Sling or YouTube TV, which again just brings back around all of the same pitfalls of a smart TV.

edit: just saw that the one you linked does have a tuner and remote! Brilliant! Might actually end up buying the 32 inch one, it's very reasonably priced.

Samsung has TVs with the "smartness" in a separate box outside the TV and the display is just a display with one connector. Something like this should be a standard.

Do you by chance know the models?

Their high end premium TVs have had it since 2019 https://www.techradar.com/news/samsung-one-connect-box

The One Connect Box has all the ports including power, HDMI, ethernet, USB etc. and the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.

So it's the regular smart TV just its smartness - any any useful ports you'd want from a TV - comes in two parts?

I'm not sure that's what the parent commenter was asking for.

> the TV has just one proprietary port where you connect the One Connect Box.

That is not a step forward.

It is - at least you can then exchange the box with the ARM CPU when the new versions of Netfix and Youtube apps start requiring 16GB of memory and a teraflop CPU, without having to chuck a screen that works perfectly fine.

Of course you can also just by an external Nvidia Shield unit and connect it by HDMI, like you can now.

Does the display have a HDMI ports or only the connector box? If the screen has some, it would be awesome. If it is only the box it would be crap.

I am just looking for a low tech TV for my grandmum as those boxes we need to run older TVs with modern TV signal always break.

The reality is, simple is only available in the luxury segment.

I am prolly going with a 'OK' brand one. Even thought I hated their ugly OS it is the only I've found so far that somewhat acts as a 'classic' TV.

Try Sceptre. They make TVs without the "smart" features (i.e. it's just a simple TV).

Check out Spectre. Decent enough screens, come in lots of sizes, all entirely dumb panels. Love mine and wouldn't trade it for any 'smart' TV.

Agreed. I recommend Roku TVs - at least the UX is simple and it doesn't spy on you or show you ads.

Doesn’t the Roku software spy on you and don’t they track what you are watching?

My pi hole's top blocked domain by some margin is is scribe.logs.roku.com, who knows what else it might be blocking or missing in addition to this.

If you have a Roku TV, I would urge you to set up a pi hole to see how many queries it sends out. Mine blocks upwards of 10 per minute.

What’s your gripe with android tvs? I hate Samsung for their ads but I own an android and have found it to be nothing less or more than what I need.

They're constantly collecting data on anything you do on the TV, and that data is being sold to whoever wants it?

Collecting data, sometimes spamming the network with faulty code, some of them have cameras a lot of people don't even know about (since they blend in with the frame), and of course showing advertisements in your menu bars and sometimes when you start the TV.

Since when have we become complacent in subsidizing our product purchases with... more ads for other products? It's absolutely ludicrous.

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