Why Your TV Will Probably Never Be Better Than It Is Now | Hacker News Reader

Why Your TV Will Probably Never Be Better Than It Is Now

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19 pointswhynotmaybe11 comments

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There is plenty of places where it can improve. Not limited to:

- better HDR support across the board

- higher refresh rate support

- thinner panels

- energy efficiency

eventually, we are going to see "television" shift into a personal activity, with VR / AR subsuming some of the content produced now

They could still get HDR working right end-to-end. I was reading about HDR in the early 2000s and really excited about it but when I looked into the specific tone mapping systems that are used today my impression is: "Great, they're going to screw up both the SDR and the extra HDR data" and it seems that's exactly what happened. Similarly, the net effect of wide gamut on color accuracy in the wild is not necessarily an improvement.

IMO, HDR mostly suffers from two things:

1. Poor color grading / mastering. For example, many of the Harry Potter movies have an “artistically” dull color scheme and don’t take advantage of HDR much. So they don’t look that different on a good display. Plenty of other movies don’t even try to take full advantage either. (Lots of movies where black isn’t actually an inky black, or where shiny things don’t translate specular highlights into brighter HDR)

2. Marketing shitty HDR displays as HDR. My monitor is “HDR” but is only HDR400. This really doesn’t look that good. Also, HDR fundamentally doesn’t really work that well if the TV doesn’t have enough local dimming zones. If you only have a single backlight, you can’t really make a diamond ring look sparkly. On an OLD, just the diamond will be displayed brighter, making it look shiny.

However, for media that is graded well and published in a high bit rate (4k Blu-ray), it looks outstanding on a good HDR display (like a Samsung s90c)

Anyways, I’m pretty confident I’ll be able to get a better TV in the future. For example, handling motion without jitter, handling reflections with high ambient light, simply getting brighter and handling burn-in better… and besides that, the display technology that looks the best (QD-OLED) has yet to make it into cheaper models most people buy.

my favorite features on a sub-$200 Roku:

1. It accepts antenna input 2. It accepts usb input 3. It accepts dvd/cd input

But the streaming is so strewn with ads, it's unbearable

I block my old TCL Roku TV from accessing the internet through my router. It works fine as an HDMI display.

thanks! Mine normally uses its connection from one day to the next. Okay then, I'll just leave it be.

Antenna works good enough for the 3 PBS channels I like, even though their antenna is 50 miles away. Just one of those cheap $30 rabbit ears. What's interesting is that the signal bounces off a south wall,through the N patio door, so when anyone moves in the path, the signal is garbled. Also, depending on the station, it must sometimes be repositioned. I enjoy the retro feel of that.

You might wanna check this : https://www.fcc.gov/media/engineering/dtvmaps

gotcha ty! This may explain all the antennae in the rural areas near here... I thought they were all HAM operators, but maybe only some are... in any case, it's great to be prepared for ... whatever ...

The complete omission of "NextGen" ATSC 3.0 standard screams this is much more rant than an actual prediction.

ATSC 3.0 seems to have enough tracking, DRM and targeted advertisement features built in I'm not sure I'd call it strictly better.

The motion clarity on most TVs is unacceptably poor

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