I wish there was some regulation that would force TVs to have a "dumb" mode. When the colors on our previous living room TV started to go out my dad ended up buying a new huge Vizio during black friday for really cheap. He left it to me to set up, since I'm the tech guy of the family, as you all probably understand.
I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.
Vizio was bought out by Walmart a while back, with the intent of expanding Walmart's advertising empire.
It's really unfortunate that the TV market has ended up the way it has. My family still has a few CRTs going that have been working every day for decades, just turn it on and TV immediately starts playing. I miss that level of simplicity.
I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in
I missed the part of your comment where you put it back in the box and returned it.
(Yeah, I know, understandable reasons. But that's exactly what I would do if it were going in my house.)
The problem is for TV manufacturers to change their ways, a lot of TVs will need to be returned.
And your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc - that's the whole point of buying a smart TV. The only returns will be from the minority who are happy to sign up and sign in for streaming services, but who balk at one more account.
Personally, I'm about to return a smart TV (because it sucks) and replace it with a dumb screen. But realistically - I don't imagine these things get returned in sufficient numbers for vendors to change their ways.
> your average Smart TV buyer is prepared to sign into Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Youtube etc
I think this is starting to change a bit especially as companies crack down on password sharing. Once the dam breaks, there's gonna be a pretty drastic and unstoppable migration towards the "dumb" TV products + more open alternatives. I'm already seeing a lot of families start to move to DVDs and Blurays for kids who just watch the same 5 movies on repeat anyway.
This migration is already happening away from Windows. Gaming was the big moat that Windows had but now with Steam Proton and better Linux alternatives, a ton of people are starting to move away and while it's not a significant majority yet, I think the tides have already turned and there's not much Microsoft can do to turn it back.
I think we won't get meaningful change until a data broker gets hacked and a huge number of people (including elected officials), have their data on display for all to see.
I have a pretty nice Samsung that I purchased maybe 5 years ago. When I initially purchased it, it was great. No account needed. Did every thing I wanted from a TV (I want it to be dumb)
I refused to update it, because I knew that at some point they would add mandatory accounts or other bloatware. Fantastic for 2 years or so.
My gf started living with me and updated it accidentally/didn't know. It now has it's own entire OS that requires 2 accounts - a Google account and a Samsung account, I believe. Devastating.
Mandatory accounts for everything. Forcing people to download certain applications. Turning off functionality if there's no subscription to X or Y. I feel we really started to take a step back for software usefulness in the late 20teens...
I've had great success blackholing and haven't seen this.
I have an LG I bought around three years ago. The first year-ish it was connected to the internet normally. That's when I first heard about the LG spying issue, and also had noticed that the TV seemed to slow down a bit with every new update it got (what a surprise).
I then isolated it to its own VLAN with no internet access whatsoever. Only other device on the same VLAN is a virtual interface on my Home Assistant server that allows me to keep using the LG webos integration and send Wake on LAN packets to the TV.
Surprisingly most of the slowness seemed to also disappear after cutting the TV from the internet. It's probably not quite as fast as it was when it was brand new, but the most noticeable difference is when turning the TV on. It's almost instant again now, compared to something like 5+ seconds it took when it had internet.
My two year old Samsung still works as a dumb display. I think it would even do cable or OTA TV without any smart nonsense but I have no need for that. Trying to use "smart" features like voice control pops up a consent form that I just never accepted so maybe that's what happened to you.
I have a 12-year-old Samsung TV I got off Craigslist for under $100 that displays images, and that's it. Oh, and it plays video off a USB stick if you plug one in.
Friend of mine used to hassle me about my TV, and how his one has much better colour saturation and soundstage and notes of vanilla, toast, smoked bacon, and chocolate. It's a network-connected (to make it work) LG smart TV...
Well my used-a-dumb-display relatively recent Samsung also has great color saturation and perfect OLED blacks. AFAIK you can use LGs in the same way but I haven't owned one myself. I wouldn't take anyone who cares about the sound of built-in TV speakers too seriously though, especially with everything in there having to be as flat as paper - just get external speakers or at least a sound bar and even average options there will blow any TV out of the water.
I bought a Hisense TV a few years back and when I set it up, I could not proceed without downloading the companion app. I was curious so I called support and told them that I didn't have a phone and asked how I could activate the TV.
Support had no answer for me other than "well you need the app". When I told them I didn't have a phone to install it on they just said "no that's not correct, you must have a phone..."
This should be an accessibility complaint under the ADA. That should be a big money settlement.
There are numerous disabilities that would cause someone to not have a smartphone capable of running an app. Hell, even addiction to social media or porn could satisfy
Lawsuits only cover actual damage. If you actually did have a phone, their decision to require one caused no harm to you, even if you pretended it did.
Same with any prepay SIM I'm aware of, to activate it you need a phone because why would anyone ever use a SIM with anything that isn't a phone, like an e-book reader for your elderly mother to read her romance novels on?
And before anyone asks, the reader takes a full-size SIM, the phones take nano-SIMs, and you can't restore it back to a full-size SIM with a shim because the reader won't allow it to be inserted, it just gets mangled as you push it into the slot.
More common is companies "pranking" their customers by adding unnecessary smartphone requirements.
If they are concerned about customers pranking support about not having a smartphone they can easily preempt that by not adding a smartphone requirement in the first place.
I am not arguing in favor of corporate apps or smart TVs (which I would not want to buy either). I'm just looking at things from the perspective of the unfortunate person doing tech support, not their corporate overlord.
That doesn't justify assuming that everyone must have a phone, nor does it make it okay to enforce that people must have a phone to use their goddamn TV
My Samsung TV has some stupid voice assistant inside of it called Bixby. Not only is it useless, it's extremely annoying.
I've had multiple experiences where it muted the show I was watching, so that it could try to listen more closely, after being triggered by something said in the show itself. Samsung's software engineers literally built a TV that interrupts itself.
Needless to say, I disabled it. But every week or two, when my TV auto-updates itself, it re-enables Bixby, at least to the degree where it starts listening again, and then mutes whatever I'm watching to ask me if I want to re-enable Bixby.
I would pay 2x for a dumber version of my otherwise-excellent TV.
You mistake was connecting the TV to the internet and accepting the "smart" consent that is required to enable the voice control functionality. Not that that excuses Samsung's behavior but for now you can still use their TVs as dumb screens for a user-respecting device.
Just as food has warnings (too much sugar, too much salt, etc), so electronics should be labelled: "requires online registration" and "captures conversations" and "scans your network".
That's not enough. We don't allow food companies to just slap on "contains lead" and keep selling poison. And if every device has this label it just becomes useless.
Network jail isn't a 100% for these -- in their testing, they determined that they could connect to the public Comcast networks that Comcast tries to blanket areas with. So even if you don't let it access your own networks, it will look for other ways to phone home.
No, they did not find this. They speculated that in the future the tvs "could" do that and that there is precedent with other devices. But despite this being repeated over and over as fact, it is in fact not proven to be the case.
Yes, it's extremely troubling, and not constrained to tv manufacturers. We need some sort of legal overhaul to protect people from this sort of thing.
For example, I was looking at Bird scooters/e-bikes while travelling since they were the local provider of rentable bikes. I noticed a particularly aggressive EULA declaration in their app and decide to skim through the EULA. In it, they had language that stated that I gave them unlimited rights to my likeness and voice. So by clicking this EULA this company could then harvest any photos of me, interviews, what have you, clone my voice or likeness with AI, use it for ads or even sell it to others to use! Needles to say I uninstalled instead of agreeing.
But how many other things did I unknowingly sign to in these EULAs? It's genuinely crazy.
I work in the refurb department of an ewaste recycling company. I had a TV on a roller stand come in some months ago. When I turned it on, I realized that it wasn't any ordinary consumer-grade TV, but a commercial grade one. It lacked any sort of smart functionality, had no apps, and reported DCI 4K resolution (4096x2160) when connected to a PC. I found a remote that worked with it (even though it was a 'smart' TV remote). I listed it as a "dumb TV" for $200 and it took a while to sell.
> and reported DCI 4K resolution (4096x2160) when connected to a PC
Was that the actual panel resolution though? Because my 4K Samsung consumer TV also reports 4096x2160 resolutions in its EDID and will accept that input (but the native 3840x2160 is marked as preferred). It would be surprising if there were entirely separate panels used only for commercial displays.
> Alternatively, you can get an Apple TV and keep the TV off networks or in network jail.
The problem is that a lot of TVs won't even let you use it that way without signing in or downloading an app first. My Vizio wouldn't do anything until I acknowledged a terms of service screen. The only way I could do that was by downloading the Vizio app and connecting it to my network.
The cost of returning the thing to the store can be high.
The packaging can be precarious; what was once stapled cardboard is now taped, what was once a neat and rigid rectangle is now kind of floppy and misshapen and getting worse every time it moves.
Besides, they're big things that can be challenging to move around. Doing it solo is mostly a non-starter.
But sure: Eventually, it gets wheeled back in through the same front door of the store that it came out of just a few hours before.
Now the real fun starts: They don't want it back. They hem and haw. Other associates arrive to reinforce the ultimately firm standpoint of "No."
You point at the return policy on the wall. You read the relevant passages aloud, word by word. You tell them, over and over again, that you're here to return merchandise.
Some smart-sounding person shows up, gives everything an appraisal, and explains "Sir, it even says DO NOT RETURN TO STORE right here on the box!"
It's not clear who got loud first, but it's quite obviously the case that things are definitely loud now.
Finally, the store manager appears. He just needs this fucking circus to end. He asks no questions, issues the refund without hesitation, and everyone walks away pissed off.
---
I mean, I guess that's resolution.
But what often happens instead is this: The TV is unpacked. It's mounted on the wall or arranged just-so on whatever furniture is involved, requiring sometimes-tricky bits of assembly the whole way through. There's excited anticipation in the air about the new widget and how much better it is going to be than the old widget.
Finally, you switch it on and discover that it can't proceed without a network login. This raises a series of red flags that you find impossible to ignore.
So you go out back to cool off for a few minutes, think about life's decisions, and Google ways to get this 2026 build of this TV that nobody online ever mentions the specific model number of to work offline without any connection.
And the missus knows how these things can go. So while that's happening, she signs the thing into the network and gets it set up with an account "just to see how it really works."
Now the TV is connected and it's never going back to the store.
Mounting on the wall is just four screws to the TV, with a standard bolt pattern that fits any modern TV. Whatever accomodations were made will work exactly the same with any TV of approximately the same size.
Since the mounting hardware you already have from your previous TV does follow VESA, you would be returning the new one for that reason.
Unless, you know, it was amazing, like completely dumb with no registration step, and offering great picture quality. That might be worth drilling some new holes in the mounting plate, or whatever it takes to make it work.
When I say returning, of course I mean not buying in the first place! "Does it have a standard bolt pattern compatible with my intended mount" is one of the first things you check for in the technical specs, long before you order something or go pick it up. If your mount is strictly 100x100, you can't have a larger TV on it that has a 200x100 or 200x200.
I've been a consumer of electronic goods for several decades, I have returned many things to stores, I've installed televisions professionally, and I've had one or more missuses.
Is there any merit to pinning me down on this matter?
Do you want me to start asking you the questions, instead?
> I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.
The only solution we have to this is to return the TV as defective and buy something else until you find something that works without an account or an app. A sane country would have regulations that make spying on you illegal but our government works for corporations instead of the public so they'll never protect us when there's money to be made off of us.
> our government works for corporations instead of the public
Yes, but we cheat ourselves out of change with learned helplessness. Did you see how much hatred the business community directed at Lina Khan when she started dusting off the old antitrust machinery? That happened recently. It can happen again. It was on the ballot, and it will be again.
Yes, I saw that too, it was quite remarkable. Still, learned helplessness would have us believe that such an appointment was impossible and yet it happened, and it happened in a Democratic party that leaned "more lib than left" to an even greater degree than it does today, or will in 2028.
So when the billionaires twirl their moustaches and say "Silly kids! You can't possibly defeat me, why do you even try?" (or, more realistically, sponsor a lackey to promote that message) one should try to have at least as much gumption as a child facing down a cartoon villain who recognizes this as smack talk rather than deep philosophical truth. The progressives of 100 years ago faced down the first round of Robber Barons and won. We've done this before and we can do it again.
You'll notice that this was not a popular discussion.
HN users don't like it when billionaires are dissed, as many want to achieve that, for themselves. Very much a reflection on the demographics of this site. Maybe not a bad thing, but kind of amusing.
Even if every single person who wants dumb TVs bought a smart TV and returned it as defective, I doubt it would even be a noticeable increase to the number of defective TVs returned.
Most TVs don't require an internet connection. I have an LG tv that I have never allowed to connect to the internet. It complains from time to time, but other than that it gives me no problem. It's connected to my PC through which I stream, watch youtube or play video games.
Yes and I wonder for the cases where people claim it did require a connection if it actually did or there were "just" dark patterns that made it appear that way - e.g. it may be that an internet connection is required for some smart feature setup flow but you can skip out of that early by declining the boilerplate all-your-rights-are-belong-to-us legalese that most people just blindly agree to.
My family bought a big Vizio TV around a year ago (IIRC), and I'm pretty sure we didn't have to sign in to anything for it to work. We didn't connect it to the internet. It often prompts for an update to the remote but the prompt goes away on its own if you don't do anything.
The model is V4K75X-0810 on firmware 86.710.52.1-4. The "Last Update" field says "Dec 31, 1969 04:00 PM" :D
The remote firmware is 6.02.1. I wonder if the reason it prompts for an update is because the TV has a newer remote firmware built-in or if it is just guessing that a newer update is available online.
I don't remember if we had to do anything weird to get the TV to set up without internet.
Do you have actual benchmarks for that? Bad TV response times usually come for unnecessary signal processing meant to make lower resolution / low frame-rate video look "better" and I don't see why that would be more common rather than less so with commercial displays.
This is one of the many reasons I haven't owned a TV for the last 5 years. I just watch stuff on the computer, or not at all. It's actually nice not having it looming over me.
How is projector superior? More often than not, with the same amount of money spent, projector produces worse image quality, consumes more power, and don't last as long.
Projectors can never come even remotely close to the contrast of an OLED. That's an inherent limitation of requiring a reflective display surface and not something that can be fixed with better technology.
There are ambient light rejection (ALR) screens available now that make projectors viable even under bright lights. Problem is, the decent ones are quite pricey, sometimes costing almost as much as the projector themselves. You could easily buy two OLED TVs for the price of a decent short throw laser projector + ALR.
The other issue issue is that most, if not all, modern projectors are also "smart", so you may run into the same privacy issues as TVs...
Maybe the best option is to just buy a PC monitor and pair it up with decent speakers, the only issue being you can't get larger screens like TVs.
Yeah the projector doesn’t quite save on room aesthetics if I need whole screen setup, unless I spend even more to make it super hidden and seamless in the room.
I’ve just found that disabling network connectivity and going with an external streaming box is the best compromise of the moment.
On LG it’s important to never agree to the terms and conditions. I’m not sure if they still allow you to do that on new TV sets. It’s very disturbing to find out that the TV is queueing up data to send home even while offline.
The Apple TV streaming box seems to be the least privacy-invasive, mostly ad-free, mainstream easy to use option on the market, but it’s certainly not perfect in that regard.
blackout shades go a long way, but if you’ve got huge bay windows that’s probably too much.
If it’s close to good, and you need a little more brightness, there are newer screens that reflect much more light. more reflective = pricier, but there’s a decent value/sweet spot.
The awful part is that streaming has pretty much ruined TV. There's hardly any new good shows on TV, and many channels have just become the same show on 24/7.
It would be one thing if we maintained the same quality of service that TV had and had streaming as an alternative, but streaming has pretty much replaced TV. Every channel always has ads for their streaming service. It's bleak.
LG recently was in the news for loading Microsoft's utility/driver update mechanism with crapware that auto installs (by default) when you hitch one of their monitors to a Windows PC. I fear they just haven't gotten around to fully abusing monitor users yet.
My research is a few months old, but at the time Vizio looked like the least bad option, largely because a lawsuit had pushed them to narrow what they collect.
There is no obligation to be truthful when it comes to providing PII for advertising. Register using a throwaway email. If an app install is mandatory, use an android emulator (set an uuid if needed). Ideally, the tv won't have ongoing internet access beyond what's required for initial setup. If not possible, at least use PiHole or similar to block telemetry.
I was surprised that the first thing I was prompted to do was to download an app and sign up for an account. The TV would not work unless I was signed in (or at the very least the option was so well hidden I didn't see one). Of course the sign up asks for PII like my name and phone number.
Vizio was bought out by Walmart a while back, with the intent of expanding Walmart's advertising empire.
It's really unfortunate that the TV market has ended up the way it has. My family still has a few CRTs going that have been working every day for decades, just turn it on and TV immediately starts playing. I miss that level of simplicity.