Well - my 15 year old dumb TV is acting up and it looks like I'm going to have to replace it sooner than later.
Looking for any input you all may have.
I'm looking in the 55 inch range (Hisense makes a 58" that would fit the space, but I think anything bigger would be pushing it).
Trying to keep it sub $500.
I've read a bunch of reddit threads, and TVs that I go into it thinking might be alright, I come away scared off from it. Some of the TV's themselves seem decent, but then the OS is garbage.
What recommendations would you, my trusted Hokie community, have for someone looking to buy their first smart TV?
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My first recommendation is to actively avoid a smart TV and try to find something with as few smart features as possible, and just pair it with a Roku, Chromecast, Fire Stick or Apple TV.
At your price, you might be able to find some previous year QLED tvs. Won't have the best picture (that would be OLED) but its very good value for the price. And at 55", its still worth getting a 4k, which shouldn't be that big of a deal since its pretty standard nowadays
Is it possible to even find a non-smart TV these days? I've been using a fire stick for years and would be fine continuing to do so
Honestly, probably not. The first thing I do when I get a new TV is update it and then kill all connectivity to disable the smart features. I even kill off most of the real time AI picture editing as well, most of the time it does nothing but slow it down and cause it to go out of sync with the sound.
I couldn't a couple years ago when looking for a cheap one to put on the bedroom wall. Ended up just buying a monitor and a set of speakers since I didn't double check that the monitor had them before ordering.
What I do is just never connect the TV to the internet and then use a firestick. It is still tracking you / feeding you ads, but at least the interface is better than the TV one that gets bloated.
Not really. You just focus on the TV attributes/capabilities that you want independent of the "smart" capabilities, and use your streaming device to stream.
Case in point: When I bought the basement TV, wow, 13 years ago, I got a 3D TV solely because it had a 4th HDMI port. At the time, I needed one for the Audio Return Channel for the soundbar, plus three others for a gaming system, a DVD player, and a streaming box.
Just get the TV for what you really need in it, and ignore the "smart" specs.
Agreed that you won't find dumb tvs anymore. The only ones that are truly dumb are pc monitors and when you get to a size that's much larger than a typical pc monitor it's prohibitively expensive. .
As much as I hate to do this, I wholeheartedly agree with Alum07 regarding getting a TV to pair with a Roku or some other streaming box.
At some point, the upgrade support on your TV is going to sunset, and the more "smart" features it has, the sooner you're going to notice things getting out of date. Streaming boxes are much better for software updates to both the box and the apps. And the user interfaces on most "smart" TVs are utter crap, so you're going to find yourself using the streaming box much more often. I bought a smart TV years ago, and once I added on a Roku box, I almost never changed the input away from that.
So I would recommend looking for a TV that has the things you want in it, ignoring the "smart" TV capabilities. Things like picture quality, size, number of HDMI/USB inputs (this is key if you have gaming systems). Then get a Roku box (or an AppleTV box, or a FireTV box, but I've used them all and the Roku user interface is the best), not the stick but the box. Streaming boxes generally have better processors in them, so you're going to have less wait time when you fire up an app.
Once you setup the TV and streaming box, Alum's advice below to disconnect the internet from the TV is really good. You're going to want to stream through the streaming box anyways.
I even gave Alum a leg or two in this thread. That's how strongly I feel about "smart" TVs. Great. Now I feel dirty. ;^)
question, are you guys suggesting rokus and other devices for streaming because the software on the tv sucks? Because I can see that. Takes me like 8 days to switch between apps, it's awful
Yes. I use fire sticks. All the smart tvs I've owned, with the exception of a brand new one, have had their WiFi quit working, and the software was lesser than the stick.
I even make sure I turn on the fire stick so that it makes the tvs skip their Home Screen and go straight to the stick.
Yup
And when the software takes a shit, or makes a significant upgrade, it's much easier and cheaper to swap those out than get a new tv
This is what I do, and part of why I've not replaced my almost 10 year old Seiki "dumb" TV. I've never had a single issue with it, and it's not the slightest hassle to pair it with the palm-sized AppleTV that is also quite old at this point. The AppleTV has had considerably fewer "bad moments" than any Smart TV I've owned or my friends/family have had. There's been a handful times where I needed to restart it over many years.
I've always loved my Vizio's so that's usually where I start, TBH all HD tv's are putting out as much definition as the human eye can even perceive so its all about color. I hated the hisense my wife had when we moved in together, that's my only experience with those. If I wasn't going to buy a Vizio I'd just spend the money and get a Samsung IMO they lead the pack in color and clarity.
The other thing to shop around for is UX of smart TV OS. I personally think they all suck and I end up getting a FireStick pretty quickly so I can't speak to many of them. Vizio's isn't the worst, Android TVs have been the bane of my existence.
Good to know - My last two TV's (including my current one) were Vizio's and they've been great - most of the criticism I've read about them lately sounds like they started going downhill when they started doing smart TVs (I think it was mostly their OS that I have read problems about)
Yeah, its hard to piece through reviews because so many people use the original OS. From what I've heard Googles newer OS (Sony) and LG's webOS are the only two worth a damn.
I think alum's response hit the nail on the head. Find the best 4k LED in your price range and save $50 for a Firestick or similar.
Lol literally the opposite of my experience. I will add that most of my gripe with my Sony/Google TV is it crashes with the Disney+ app relatively frequently and it is an absolute pain in the ass to get it to communicate with my surround sound via the HDMIarc input.
+1
Haha that is funny. I forget that Roku comes as a native OS on TVs that has to be one of the better native OS's but the bar is so low.
I have 2 Roku TVs and a Google TV. The Roku TVs are so much easier to use, but the UI is a bit cheesy/dated. I've used a couple LGs during vacations and they have the absolute worst UI I've ever experienced.
Reiterating what others have referenced above, in my experience dumb TVs are hard to come by these days and from what I remember when shopping around ~1.5yrs ago they are typically a bit pricier than their smart counterparts. I do think that plugging in a Roku, fire stick, etc works better than the built-in hardware in most cases and once the TVs stop getting updates you can get a new plugin device a lot cheaper than a TV. Another thing to consider is how easy it is to tie into existing home theater equipment if you have any. That has been the biggest issue with my Google TV.
Home theater is when it starts to get pricey, but if you have that option the best thing you can do is to get a good receiver and let it act as the home base for the whole system, with only the HDMI out running to the TV. That way the TV is acting purely as a TV and all the thinking is handled elsewhere.
Agreed, my Sony TV is connected to sonos because my wife was insistent on not seeing any wires anywhere and this was the easiest solution at our previous house. The Rokus are connected to a receiver in the mancave and they work flawlessly.
I got a new Vizio a few years ago (65" M series) and have been having issues with some of the local dimming zones (I think I have like 100 different zones) getting stuck with different brightness during all content that really shows up as different color rectangles in the background when the content is white/light. It's extremely annoying and seems to be not uncommon for their local array dimming
I recommend a nice heavy CRT. /s
Im a big Samsung and Sony guy. In general, avoid the cheaper LGs, ONN, Hisense, etc. Sony and Samsung are a clear cut above. If this is for a spare bedroom etc, and you are on a tight budget- LG is fine. If budget is no matter- go OLED.
OLED Is top of the class, yes, but it is worth pointing out that they still haven't quite figured out how to eliminate burn-in, so if you're always watching channels that have the same graphics on the screen without cycling (sports and news channels) then it might be worth considering something like QLED.
I was checking out Samsung's today, these two in particular. Trying to figure out if there's enough difference to justify the $140 price difference
DU7200b
DU8000b
I bought a non-smart TV Seiki after I graduated college in 2015 and it's the best TV I've ever had. Never even had to turn off motion smoothing/frame interpolation, because it doesn't even have the (extremely horrible) feature which is now standard, and turned on, on every TV you buy these days. As an avid movie watcher, it literally hurts my eyes to watch things with motion smoothing on, and frankly, is a gross perversion of the artistry of the images.
It's outlasted several different "smart" TV's that I've had since then (all of which started developing lagging issues, having to be restarted frequently, and generally degraded in quality somewhat rapidly). However, as I'm looking around now it appears the Seiki brand is no longer being made since 2017. The parent company, TongFang Global still makes Element TV's.
I can't really speak on the quality of the OS in those TV's though, I imagine they are all using one of the big brands (Roku, Amazon Fire, Tizen, etc), and I'm not sure any of them are free of issues, most of which are similar as I understand it.
So, consider this long comment that started as a suggestion about getting a non-smart Seiki TV as a PSA to turn off motion smoothing/frame interpolation on your TV (they all have different names depending on TV brand -- ex. MotionFlow (Sony)). Almost every TV show/movie you've ever seen was shot in 24fps and should be watched in that frame rate so as to give yourself the best experience, and to avoid bastardizing the artistry of the director/cinematographer.
Is that the "soap opera effect" feature? It is god awful
Yes it is often called the "soap opera effect" and is now standard on basically every TV and turned on, so it's on you to find it and turn it off.
Oh, also on top of that, find out where your eco-mode is on your device and disable it as well.
We were watching some sitcoms last year (How I Met Your Mother and New Girl) and I started to notice that the screen was just dark. Much darker than I remember when I was watching when it aired live. Did some digging and realized that the Samsung tv we were using had an EcoMode that was absolutely buried in the menus, completely separate from any of the picture settings, and once it was disabled, everything ended up being corrected. And it was noticeably bad, it was as if the shows were filmed in absolute piss poor lighting.
This is true, and makes a big problem (many TV shows and movies have all but abandoned the art of properly (or interestingly!) lighting shots) worse. While I prefer film, you can do some really cool stuff with digital, but a lot of digital looks like shit because they aren't trying to do interesting things, lighting shots well, and/or it is being poorly color graded.
what is it called on a Sammy?
Auto Motion Plus or Picture Clarity, depending on when you bought it. Additionally, it seems like some of them have standard and an HDR/HDR+ (Netflix, and some other apps) situation where you have to disable it in both modes or else some modes will still have it. This sounds immensely frustrating.
This link has a thorough solution written out.
I've used Rtings to get detailed reviews of TV's. They have a standardized process for testing them which makes it easy to compare multiple brands and models.
Unfortunately the $500 budget pretty much will be only TVs that RTings rate poorly because they will not test well per the standardized process. I would use the site to see what's out there, but try to see TVs in person. $500 and less will only have TCL and Hisense recommended on Ratings typically.
I bought a cheap Hisense that got good reviews on RTings for an outdoor TV. It worked great, was pretty bright, and uses Chromecast as the smart interface.
Of course a $500 TV isn't going to get good ratings next to a $3000 LG OLED, but that doesn't mean it won't work for your purposes. I suggest trusting RTings.
Thanks for this link, lots of good info, making me doubt the models I posted earlier lol
You can research on Rtings.com. Best Budget TVs. If you are in a bright room find the brightest tv you can. Hisense and TCL make decent tvs (but quality control is poor) at $500-$600ish for 55". The cheaper tvs have issues with not enough brightness, and poor black colors/bleeding of lighter colors into darker color.
I will be honest, I bought Mom one of the big 65" Walmart Brand Roku TV's. It has worked fine and has a very simple interface.
Honestly, we have a couple of those (not for the main TVs, though). They work fine, are inexpensive, and the Roku interface is native, so great UI.
One other thing that is nice about the Roku TVs is that if you lose the remote, you can always use the Roku app on your phone, which pairs with every Roku TV/box/stick on your wireless network. It's also fun to mess with the TV my kids are watching downstairs. ;^)
Just hit the input button on the remote until you find the one you are looking for.
I bought a 65" TCL Roku tv with UHD and QLED 3 years ago and have absolutely zero regrets. It's very feature-rich but also super easy to use (I don't use most of the bells and whistles it has). Looks like from a quick search you could nab a 50" or 55" for less than $300.
A bunch of the reddit posts I was reading always lead back to TCL, I'd never even heard of them until beginning to do this research.
Yeah I wasn't too familiar with them myself, but I asked my much more tech-savy friend what I should get and he told me to buy a TCL tv that has QLED haha. Although from what I see online, it looks like OLED is sometimes the better choice but it depends on where your tv is located (dark room = OLED evidently).
The thing that is making me hesitant on the TCL, looking at the review on RTINGS.com, one of the cons says it has "Inadequate viewing angle", how is the image from views other than mostly head on?
Keep in mind- TVs are no different than anything else- you get what you pay for. A 285 dollar 65 inch TV is not going to look as good/have the same angles as a 1400 65 inch TV. If you want a man cave TV to watch the game on in a dark basement, a cheap TV is fine. If you want to watch dark fast moving movies in 4K on your main TV- spend more.
Gotta have more to spend more. I'm currently watching a 15 year old pre-ultra HD TV - anything is likely to be an upgrade image-wise. Not taking on unnecessary debt for a item. I'd love to have a spare $1400 sitting around for a new TV, but it just is not a reality.
Go to costco- Find an LG the size you want in QLED, it is likley to be very affordable. If not a costco member, Wal Mart often has killer deals/specials on larger TVs - they detest taking up inventory space- it cost them money.
I bought Mom's 65" Onn TV for 298 at Walmart it is still available for that price. Roku interface, plenty of HDMI and even composite connections. At under 300, you can afford to replace it if it breaks after 2-3 years.
There has never been a better time to get a cheap TV, in whatever size you want.
Go to the store and look at the ones in your price range. It will surely be better than your last TV, and in a bigger size with better features.
Durability will vary, but you can always repeat this if it does.
this has always been my mantra with phones -- upgrades from Pixel to Pixel 3a and then to Pixel 6a were like night and day different for me and felt incredible vs what i had, even though i had people in my life telling me the $300 i spent on the 6a was a worse purchase than getting the brand new 7 Pro or whatever it was at the time for $750
Personally the viewing angles are great on mine. I can stand at like a 150 degree angle to the tv (or 30 I guess depending on how you look at it) and still see it just fine. Just for comparison's sake, here's the exact model I bought in 2021 (it was $800 at the time):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0885N17CC?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_t...
I think I'm zeroing in on the TCL Q7 or QM7
https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/compare/tcl-q7-q750g-qled-vs-tcl-qm7-qm7...
Q7 is currently on sale at BestBuy for $400, QM7 is at walmart for $600. Based on the scores on RTINGS, they seem to rank very similarly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8TOO8Q9I24
Copped a 5(?)" Hisense Roku from Costco 3 years ago. I think it's wonderful for the price point.
I haven't read through all the comments so sorry if someone has already posted this: stay away from Vizio, even the more expensive models. I've had 3 crap out and each one was around 2 years old. Have replaced one with a TCL, one with a Hisense and the last one with another Vizio. No issues so far with the cheaper TCL or Hisense.
Edit: I thought for sure one of the replacements was a TCL but it's not, it's also a Hisense. So all-in-all in my house 1 Vizio, 3 Hisense and 1 Westinghouse. The Westinghouse was one of the very first 1080p flatscreens made, we bought it in 2006 when we bought our first house. Still works like a charm.
Vizio used to be a solid go to budget brand around the late 2000s into the 2010s. Since then, they've lowered the relative quality and raised prices while trying to coast off of their perceived brand quality. It's gotten so bad that Walmart actually acquired Vizio about a year ago. They've been mentioned a lot in this thread, but Hisense and TCL are the go to budget brands at the moment as you've also noticed.
Dang I didn't know that. That's good to know I've had such good luck with them I recommend them cause my 70" from 2017ish is still awesome while I've run through a couple other brands in my bedroom.
I buy the cheapest TVs and then block everything via pi hole and ip based on my router for that make and model and then I dont hook it into the internet because fuckem
I'd avoid a TV altogether and get a good projector. They make them with sharp images these days, they are mobile, easy to use, and my favorite part is that you're not looking directly into the light source when viewing so it's less strain on the ol' eyeballs
"They make them with sharp images these days"- no question. I just purchased a high end Benq for my golf sim. While very sharp, it will never look as sharp as a 1080p OLED or upper end TV though. Different animal. You are right about eye strain though
Yeah, that, and an OLED won't quite take the impact of a golf ball the way a projector screen will.
Meh- I'm super accurate (lol)
Nothing beats watching movies on a good projector.
I have a Sony 65in TV X90K. Works well, and the android TV built in hasn't given me issues at all. Sharp picture.
I don't play video games, so keep that in mind.
Sony just works, and they work well. I hit a great deal at costco, but I get they have an added cost to them.
The budget may preclude this, but when I upgraded a couple years ago to an OLED it was like watching TV for the first time. If you can spring for one I can tell you its worth it. That said, if one of your primary uses is going to be on movies you need to pay attention to the number of dimming zones in the panel. Non-OLED TVs (still) have a challenge with image bloom effects (those halos you get around bright objects that are surrounded by darker areas). Minimizing that is done by having more dimming zones, so the greater the dimming zones, the less bloom.
Just pulled the trigger on the 55" TCL Q7 QLED
Thank you all for the input, I think it helped, or made me question my own judgement even more...one of those two!
Thanks for following up.
Let us know how it works out.
Will do - picking it up from BestBuy this weekend. From what I've read the default settings for TCL's kinda suck, but once you get everything calibrated, it's supposed to be pretty slick