If you can't move in menus or mute instantly, than no thank you to innovation.
TV experience 20 years ago sucked. Now I can have all the content I could ever want immediately accessible via Plex, no need to fiddle with DVDs or gasp VHS tapes. Commercials? hah. Unskippable anti-piracy warnings? nope.
Maybe just do not connect it to a network ever. At least I don't. I've used TV as a monitor for a while but after some time strain in the neck showed up I downsized to 32" 4K monitor
This is slowly but surely not becoming an option. Beyond automatically connecting to any open networks, some models already will stop working until you give them a network connection to perform a 'necessary' periodic update.
Automatically connecting to open networks sounds like a potential legal quagmire, since aiui I’m not legally allowed to just use my neighbor’s wifi without permission.
I'll choose to use the TV's app every time.
I have a higher-end LG 4K OLED with WebOS which is extremely responsive compared to others I've had, also it's rooted to block any ad-crap, but also you can do most of that at the DNS/Network/Router level if you have an issue.
Then there's the fact that the non-tech family members don't want to use more than one remote or fiddle with channels etc, my wife can press the Netflix button in the remote from TV off and have instant Netflix and tue surround sound on too.
Younger me would have agreed with you, but as a parent and husband, in my mid 30s, I just want an easy life.
(Fwiw though my impression was that it was a mid grade brand name tv. Certainly not a no name bottom tier).
Once the manufacturer sells the TV, they don't give a fuck about you anymore, they're already paid! Though they would like to push updates to send you more ads and track you.
I've never attached my 2020 LG 4k 65" to any network and it works great. I did pay $50 to add a GoggleTV CrapCast thing, it works fine for watching movies.
Advertisers or data brokers? They’re already subsidizing the purchase price of TVs.
I hear this claim a lot but have never actually found even a single one that does.
As luck would have it, https://rootmy.tv came out for Web OS. It's still in a very basic stage, but it's better than nothing!
I'm a HomeAssistant user, so I do want my TV connected to my network.
Now, the equipment that takes that display device and actually connects it to things like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, etc.... that IS a device that I want connected to my network. It's called an Apple TV, and definitely is connected to my network. And it connects to the Samsung TV over HDMI.
I guess that would work as long as you move to a place far away from humanity. It definitely won't work if a neighbour runs a WiFi hotspot without password protection.
Movie cinemas are dead to me now. I would never switch back to a shitty LCD. Or even a "good" LCD.
I'm super sensitive to jitter as well, so your information about OLEDs being jittery is wrong.
Smooth panning would be fixed by content being shot at something higher than 24fps, like you say; but I've seen that same jitter in theater screens for decades, it wasn't something that was designed to depend on CRT tech or such (like videogame lightguns).
TVs have been doing tons of "smart" picture processing to try to smooth out motion since so much content is so low frame rate. It just often looks fake!
Many, many smart TVs send analytic data to marketing companies. Some even send full snapshots of the screen. https://archive.ph/DWTGC
> When tracking is active, some TVs record and send out everything that crosses the pixels on your screen. It doesn’t matter whether the source is cable, an app, your DVD player or streaming box.
> Many of the TV companies say they aren’t violating our privacy, because ACR data technically isn’t “personally identifiable information.” TVs, they say, are shared by an entire household.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/10/22323790/lg-oled-tv-...
I play Steam Games on a 77" OLED like this and the only reason I dont use it for normal day to day development is I dont have a suitable recliner keyboard/mouse setup. Got the TV for $2,000 from Woot a year ago and it is the VRR model.
Why are monitors with similar capabilities at a third of the size so expensive?
I always have 2 wishes:
- For TVs to have a mode that just displays the signal according the reference mode of that signal (particularly for HDR) and not fuck with it to make it "better".
- For a decent selection of monitors that come with larger panels.
I use it for a bunch of terminals, so part of the left column of text and the entire bottom line, or my status bar, were unreadable. Thankfully my window manager had an unsupported feature that let me "pretend" that those areas didn't exist.
So what I learned is that TV-oriented panels aren't just directly usable on the desktop.
However, I was more recently able to pick up a couple 32" Dell 4K displays for $300-ish each, and they are glorious! That was on a big year-end sale.
I use my 32" 4K for just that at 100% scaling and totally happy. Fonts looks fine to me. Do not feel low res at all.
There are downsides. The colors aren't great. The blacks are just dreadfully light. Sometimes there are artifacts when I use the screen after it has been idle for a time, but the artifacts disappear quickly.
I am not using magnifying glass so for my eyes smoothness is just fine without "retina" prefix.
>"The colors aren't great. The blacks are just dreadfully light"
If you care so much about colors get real pro display. Just be prepared to second mortgage your house for that.
For mere mortals (I mostly use 32" BenQ monitors) colors on are reasonably fine and so are blacks. No artifacts. I do not see Apple as superior in this department.
Once again, if for some reason you need perfect colors / blacks / uniformity / whatnot Apple with its "retina" is not the one to go with. Try Eizo for example
Once your eyes turn forty, see which group you're in!
However, right now, I can't tolerate screens with lower PPI than Retina.
Yeah. That's what I mean. Just a little further away, same pixel density. It's nice.
I will say that the difficulties I had getting dual 4K working in my setup make me glad I didn't try for something like 8K. In my case, I have a recent Dell XPS 15, but not quite recent enough. My docking station can't do 4K output. The next newer XPS 15 can. In the end I found that using two USB-C to HDMI cables, directly connected to the laptop, will do it, so that's good enough for me. Went from the 1-cable docking to 3, but I'm ok with that. I don't tend to move my laptop much these days.
This is going to sound dismissive and entitled, but I've learned that people's eyesight and visual processing is extremely bad in general.
Its instantly visible as soon as you see any sharp edges / letters.
2k 32" is 80 dpi, that puts it at the same pixel density as fullhd on 24". That's perfectly usable but not particularly sharp at normal viewing distances
But I have my 32in monitor above my CRG9 (I use the 4K screen for my work computer) and I somewhat regularly end up with the same text displayed on both at the same time. The CRG9 resolution is noticeably inferior to my 48 year old eyes. Which I have to tell you, don't have the acuity they once had. 20/20 the last time I tested, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's falling below that now. Getting old blows.
The difference isn't too bothersome unless I'm bouncing back and forth between them. I get used to the lower resolution of the CRG9 pretty quickly and forget about it. And of course it's totally fine for coding.
OLED is the way to go, but it's a bit spendy at the moment.
(“Smart”) TVs are subsidized by the push advertising and analytics crammed into their firmware.
Smart TVs continue to make money for the manufacture after the sale by providing data to viewer measurement and consumer research companies and through all of those apps they integrate in the TV’s smart functions and subsequent app usage.
“This is a cutthroat industry,” Baxter went on to say. “It’s pretty ruthless. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off the TV. I need to cover my costs.”
Every time I switch it on I get an ad for Apple Music that I can't disable.
I wish they did more with HDMI, even though HDMI is being phased out. I want to hook up my computer and have the computer gain an ethernet link from the TV, even though the TV is wirelessly connected to my router. The TV should be a "dock" that includes a 2nd monitor. I have a wireless controller reciever plugged into the USB port on the TV. I want that to give input to my computer from it. I also want my computer to charge while being hooked up to my TV. I think the only answer is this TV should have type-c and do all those things as a dock, but it's frustrating that we're 1 step behind.
I wish I could watch a program, while showing my computer hdmi input picture-in-picture. Hell this thing has 4 HDMI inputs on the back, let me do each input to a quarter of the screen. Another niche use..
Don't even get me started on the ads. Doesn't make sense to keep the TV on when my computer is locked for long periods of time, so I generally come back, turn on the TV, and unlock the computer. First thing I see is fucking ads. Takes 2 clicks on the remote to dismiss but it colors my experience that they're always pushing another $30 or $40/month service when I first see things onscreen. They know you can't get this quality elsewhere so they're happy to push you ads. And the telemetry, my god. It's my $3k TV!
Most TVs are still waiting to support the next hdmi standard so you can do 120fps & hdr simultaneously.
The 2 things that did impress me were this LG tv supporting both Miracast and Airplay with /no/ hoops to jump through. It just worked. I do wish I could "cast" things to the TV, and that's like pushing a link to it where the TV navigates to that stream and plays. No other device has to stream or push the video to the TV, it does it itself in the Chomecast paradigm. That would be nice.
</rambling>
On the other hand what is possible is buying a great display (link a 120 Hz HDR OLED), buying a great dock (thunderbolt 4 doing power, ethernet, and more), buying a great app/casting solution (like a Shield TV providing Android apps and Chromecast casting), buying a great multiview HDMI matrix, and so on and connecting them to the TV with the advent of HDMI CRC making it so you never have to manually adjust sources (excluding the multiview case where you want to see PiP versions of multiple sources at once in which case there is no adjusting outside adjusting what is PiP'd). This all comes with the upside when you want a better display or a new technology comes along you don't have to replace all $$$$ of it at once.
For what we pay, I wish they'd consider some of these niches rather than startup ads or an AI that looks at what you're viewing and suggests other channels mid-viewing. Creeeeeepy.
I've seen some business monitors that will show a 2x2 grid of your inputs. I think you can get some sort of device/box to add this feature to existing screens.
I really wanted this feature a few years ago, but hadn't thought about it lately. I wanted to turn a 65" 4K TV into 4 1080p monitors, basically. When a PC is hooked to it, I run i3wm, but this doesn't handle cases like someone hooking up a game console or another PC and wanting to show both. Maybe with some capture cards you could display other inputs in mpv.
If we could put our own software on TVs or swap out the boards with more hackable ones, that would be cool. Just buy a dumb display with speakers and let the free software community handle the rest.
LG has one, the 43UN700, which also has a serial port for controlling picture-input layout options, and sound-source. It has a mode for showing any4of6 inputs at the same time, and a bunch of layout options for any2of6 ( Top/Botton, Left/Right, Main/PiP) inputs. Sound output can only come from active sources, though. My only "software gripe" up to now. It comes with a ton of cables, but NOT the required RS232C (looks like audio-jack) adapter. Hrmpf.
Even my 2017 C7 has it, but it's pretty clunky - no overlay and only two small screens next to each other, and it's pretty slow to enter/leave that mode as well, maybe 3s of black screen before it enters or exits that mode (I think it's called multi-display).
I wouldn't use it, but it's there.
Personally I don't want the TV companies experimenting with more networking options, because I know they'd only use it for evil.
edit: if you meant aesthetically, yeah, no, it's ugly plastic.
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/10/studio-display-pro-laun...
I switched companies last year and was gonna return the screen they gave me to use for home office, and buy my own. I looked it up, and the screen had cost like 700 USD back in 2016. So I thought I for the same price, 5 years later, I would get a sweet upgrade.
But no, basically same specs. Same panels, perhaps upgraded a bit, but not much had happened. Prices were the same, perhaps because of the pandemic. Luckily my previous company ended up gifting me the screen.
My new company ended up giving me the "newer" version of the monitor at the office. Only difference I can see is that it now charges my laptop via usb-c. Neat, but not much innovation in those 5 years.
This year, I went through four different monitors to find one that works. Stay away from IPS panels, they all suffer from "IPS glow", which is visible when using high contrast colours (i.e., a bright window on a dark desktop background will blast a translucent white "overlay" above and below the window). "Smart" 4K TVs are untrustworthy, IMO (e.g., Samsung is known for spying/spyware and inopportune ads, making them a hard pass).
The ROG STRIX XG43UQ was the only display I could find that runs at 120 Hz, works with a KVM switch (IOGEAR 2-Port 4K DP), has a 16:9 aspect ratio, offers 4K resolution, uses a VESA 100 adapter, and is suitable for programming. The OS must be instructed to render using BGR instead of RGB, which Linux supports. The panel has some subtle horizontal glow in rare high-contrast situations, but it's nowhere as noticeable as IPS panels.
Depending on your definition of affordable, it runs for about $1,300.
https://rog.asus.com/ca-en/monitors/above-34-inches/rog-stri...
It only works on monitors/TVs that support DisplayPort.
The new quantum dot displays are also very innovative.
Yeah, I know the reason is that modern games make all the graphic cards left over that aren't being used for crypto die in horrible flaming balls of heat when you actually ask them to ... you know ... actually use the pixels on your monitor. GASP! The Horror!
So, how can we fix this? I know! Let's make sure the monitors don't have enough pixels to cause the graphics cards grief. Brilliant!
1440p@1x or 5k@2k let you fit more than 1080p@1x or 4k@2x while feeling plenty large enough with modern application design on a typical (24/27 inch) sized display.
What am I missing with 60Hz compared to 120Hz? Honest question. When I look at friends' office setups with latest curved 4k (or now 8k) monitors I do not see anything that I like more than my current monitor, so while we are generally not limited in workstation or monitor options at work I see no reason to upgrade.