This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Not as bad as this, but when I moved to a new town I got a free big TV with my new ISP. I was going with that ISP anyways so a free 4k HDR TV on top was a nice bonus.
I wish I had gotten some other bonus. Viewing angle is atrocious and it is impossible to get rid of the input lag (no there isn't a gaming mode or similar) so no games with precise timing can be played.
So now we have a big living room TV that is too good to replace with something better but bad enough to be a little bit annoying.
It really doesn't sound too good to replace? It sounds like you got free junk, and haven't actually bought a TV yet?
Ads and bloat are the main reason I still use my 1080p Bravia from 15 yrs ago, which btw still looks great.
Well, that and that I have better uses for 1k usd
I’ve seen LG getting trashed alongside the other offenders in the industry in smart TV discussions. I have an LG CX65 OLED from 2020, and I’ve always seen the onboard WebOS as pretty serviceable. Have they gotten a lot worse in the last few years? And/or does it vary by product price?
There are definitely some advertising options to turn off in the menus, and with all that taken care of the only UI I use is a row of app icons that pops up. No ads anywhere, and I don’t seem to be logged into the TV with any kind of account. (Though typing this reminded me that the cheap LG LCD in my son’s room does want a login in order to update firmware)
Note I said it was serviceable, not great. The UI could be more responsive on better hardware, but it’s also convenient for my family to just be able to use the Wiimote-like motion pointer built into the remote.
computer monitor + sound bar?
This really seems to be the right answer. At least while computer monitors stay dumb.
Get one of those tiny PCs that you can just leave behind the TV, get a wireless mouse and keyboard too.
Nothing on TV isn't available online anyway. Paying the cable company for anything more than an Internet connection seems like setting money on fire to me. Maybe sports would be difficult, but that can literally be found if you know what you're doing. Even games you wouldn't be able to with TV.
Cable TV just seems to me like a boomer's version of the Internet. It has no place in a world with the Internet, change my mind. The ads on TV are worse than what you find on any popular website/app.
But as usual, capitalism is messing everything up with the marketing. In a world where hi speed Internet is widely available, "TV" just has no use. None. And worse, the commercials are now leaking through your literal screen.
I'm not saying that ads aren't a problem, but there's a hell of a lot more you can do about them.
In a perfect world, there would be a place you could go whenever you wanted something and find products and solutions for that thing, and there wouldn't be ads in anything else at all.
But until there's an actual argument to say TV technology isn't totally worthless, my stance is simply "no TVs are necessary or useful".
You can get little combined keyboard/track pads for $20-30. They're the same size as a remote, usually rechargeable, and kind of a pain to type on... But perfect for typing in the name of what you're searching for
Or a beamer if you want a big screen.
I needed a second t.v for the basement and i decided to just not buy one.
I had an old mini projector I repurposed and there a nice tv upstairs/phones for anything else.
Cant wait till "minimal" stuff becomes the trend.
Nothing to research. They're all the same bad or will get bad in the foreseeable future. Only thing that matters is the screen technology and the specs of your external media center.
My LG has none of this. Any advertising/ai can be disabled as can the network itself.