I find Sony TVs to be pretty quick. I use it them in conjunction with Apple TV, and I never have to deal with the TV itself, and it is quick to turn itself off and on via HDMI CEC.
They are not the high end models either, I have a $630 one from 2016 and a $600 one from 2020.
My Roku-built-in TV is usable in maybe 3-4 seconds—when it's in sleep mode. A cold boot (say, if it's lost power for any reason) does take tens of seconds.
Meanwhile, my dumb LCD TV from ~2008 only does cold boots and comes up in maybe 2 seconds, no matter what.
I assume Roku does not have the sufficient resources to properly equip their products with the necessary hardware to cope with their software, resulting in a compromised product that manifests as slow start times.
Unfortunately, I do not see how some of these smaller players can come close to being competitive with the big players seeing how small the profit margins are on physical devices.
Unless they have a reputation for very high quality, I assume there are lots of compromises being made on the hardware side to be able to compete on price.
> I assume Roku does not have the sufficient resources to properly equip their products with the necessary hardware to cope with their software, resulting in a compromised product that manifests as slow start times.
I dunno—this TCL Roku TV's the best-performing smart TV I've used, including some very expensive ones. It's really fast except for cold boots (again: these only happen if the power's actually been interrupted, or, rarely, on updates). Roku's OS helps, since it's way less resource-hungry than, say, Android-derived operating systems. I've done some work with Roku devices so I've used lots of them, and even the very low-end ones have always performed really well. The OS is weird, but you can't say it's not (relatively) resource efficient and responsive.
... I do have a much-worse brand of Roku TV that is badly under-powered. It sucks. It's the brand that replaced TCL at our local Costco—Hisense, it's called. Looks almost the same, costs almost the same, but is terrible. Fine if you treat it as a dumb panel and just use stuff plugged in to it, but terrible if you intend to use the built-in Roku OS for anything other than switching inputs. Frequent (apparent) out-of-memory crashes, many less-well-made (but major) streaming "apps" are laggy, and so on.
Its not just Roku. Every single TV sold is like this from every single manufacturer. They are all slower and shittier at being a TV screen than my 720p screen from like 2005. What's with that? It's like a giant cabal of an entire industry deciding that their customers aren't worth the hardware, no matter of its some Walmart only entry level TV or the top of the line thousands of dollars screen from a major brand. The only way to get a competent TV is to not even buy retail, but buy the same exact panels without the dumb hardware from the commercial market.
I am sure there are plenty of qualified people doing the necessary due diligence to figure out which features, or perception of features, customers are willing to pay for.
I doubt the executives at Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Hisense, etc are sitting there and consciously choosing to keep people away from fast, dumb TVs for the hell of it. It is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins, no one is obviously making much money, so after all these years, I would surmise they are making decisions that allow them to stay in business after all these years.
Personally, I am biased towards Sony, and I am happy with the speed of the two consumer line TVs I have purchased. However, I only use them in conjunction with Apple TV, so I have no idea with changing channels or inputs or any of that is like.
You would think that somewhere in the market there is a price point that means you get more powerful hardware in the TV. It really seems like the TVs at the entry level have the exact same hardware as TVs that cost 5 times as much or more. Surely that markup should afford hardware that is slightly faster and still produce a profit margin. If people are willing to pay 5x more for a panel their eyes can barely percieve the differences in, surely they'd be happier with a smoother UX experience compared to a competitors offering.
> I doubt the executives at Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Hisense, etc are sitting there and consciously choosing to keep people away from fast, dumb TVs for the hell of it. It is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins, no one is obviously making much money, so after all these years, I would surmise they are making decisions that allow them to stay in business after all these years.
Again, at least part of why this is happening is they can't sell ads and spyware-data with dumb TVs. Features that consumers want may be a factor, but I can guarantee you (as in: I've had some actual insight into the industry) that a big reason is that they can monetize their customers' data and eyeballs with smart TVs, and so undercut any competitors who choose not to do that. Price matters a lot to TV buyers, so this is effective at driving sales (and so, keeping your product on store shelves, and avoiding a product death-spiral).
Sometimes they will seek out nearby open WiFi networks to join. There’s concern that in coming years with the spread of 5G availability that smart TVs may start packaging a 5G modem and connecting to cell networks, bypassing the need to be connected to a WiFi network.
Because 5G is intentionally marketed as having this functionality. It helps by allowing more efficient low-speed connections, and simpler radio design for very simple implementation. It also has 'slicing' which would make it much easier to provide a wide 5G network to e.g. all LG devices without LG building towers.
As I understand it, the standard allows a single tower to offer different quality of service levels so operators can sell cheap low bandwidth connections to IoT manufacturers. TVs wouldn't have modems before because no TV manufacturer wanted to pay for a full 3G or 4G connection.
It's supposed to enable much-cheaper options for IoT applications. If the cost of the chip + the cost of low-bandwidth access drops below the profit gained by ensuring all your TVs can always reach an unfiltered network, they'll start adding them.
Because getting the data about what people are watching plus maybe input from microphone/camera is more valuable than a contract with mobile carriers that would give good prices to vendors.
So one Reddit post with zero evidence that has since been deleted? While I understand the distrust I'll take some repeatable evidence (which would be excedingly easy to do) over a random, now deleted Reddit post.
False. You would need to buy (or just randomly happen to have) a smart TV model that exhibits this characteristic, which would be very difficult to find, as there is a very wide spread of smart TV models and features, and obviously this "feature" wouldn't be advertised. This is neither easy nor free.
You're also clearly moving the goalposts. You first asked for evidence, and then discarded the evidence because "it wasn't good enough".
Nor is this capability either technically difficult to implement, illegal, easily-noticed by the average consumer, or abnormal for companies like Samsung, which already engage in highly-intrusive ad-surveillance activities[1].
While I am rather cynical about manufacturers of all sizes and their attitudes towards customers, I agree with the GP.
If this is a common thing, this should be easy to replicate. If it is one unverified reported incident in the whole world then... I have to be skeptical.
Don't get me wrong though, my innate cynicism expects this or similar via 5G to be coming in the near future. But it doesn't appear to be happening yet.
> False. You would need to buy (or just randomly happen to have) a smart TV model that exhibits this characteristic, which would be very difficult to find, as there is a very wide spread of smart TV models and features, and obviously this "feature" wouldn't be advertised. This is neither easy nor free.
If the reddit poster had provided model numbers, not just "Samsung TVs" this would become trivial to verify. They however did not. They also didn't provide any proof other than "it deffo happened guys".
> You're also clearly moving the goalposts. You first asked for evidence, and then discarded the evidence because "it wasn't good enough".
Again, as I stated in my reply while I understand your skepticism and distrust of the industry my standard of evidence is somewhat above one random guy on reddit with no verifiable evidence.
It depends strongly on the brand. LG is well known to be good in that situation. I bought one on the recommendation of HN comments and it seems to work great to me.
Not something I would install to my grandma. Really, she doesn't of course have internet, just the old analog landline phones, doesn't know how to use a computer or a smartphone or anything like that, I want a TV that is simple, just press a button and it powers up on the specified channel.
Next year they will switch off DVB to migrate to DVB-T2, and of course I must buy her a new TV (using a decoder it's not an option, too complex having to manage two remotes controls), and it seems that nobody produces dumb TVs anymore...
Yea a monitor is not a bad idea but they don't come in very large sizes or are way overpriced. Also if you'd want a decent speaker build in, monitors are not always the best
Some (Sony) pop up random nag screens in the middle of the movie or show you're watching. Even if that show is being streamed on a different smart device or you are watching OTA TV where internet is completely unnecessary.
Some brands/models can't even be setup without an internet connection and setting up accounts (and sometimes credit card information). Eventually, they'll probably have their own independent 5g connection.
I can't remember the brand. I think it was one of the cheaper Roku tvs produced by a Chinese company I saw when I was looking for a replacement for my parents (reminds me of the issues with Onyx Boox devices).
At this point, I just assume everything is spying.
(Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to harvest your data, I guess.)
Our TV started to complain that the Wifi module was unplugged (which apparently is on the main board). Problem: This happened regularly with a dialog box. 'Solution': Put a Wifi dongle in the USB port.
