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Charleston Hokie here and I gotta say, HokieAndrew did a pretty bang up job with the recs. A couple things I'd mention:
- could not agree with Wild Olive more. It's on Johns Island (where I live) which is south of the city by 15 minutes but it's dynamite.
- Unfortunately, you'll probably have to pass on the Wild Olive's sister restaurant, The Obstinate Daughter, as they had a fire last week and will be closed for a while.
- 167 Raw or 167 Raw Sushi are both fantastic if you like Seafood
- If you can't get a reservation at FIG and you like seafood, the owner (Mike Lata, James Beard Award-winner) has another great restaurant on upper King Street called The Ordinary which is great
- Lots of great barbeque here in the city but I'm partial to Lewis Barbeque which is in the NoMo (North of Morrison Street) part of town. Rodney Scott's and HomeTeam Bbq are also great.
- Chubby Fish is my new favorite spot just a block or two off of Upper King Street. They don't take reservations so everyday, a line forms out front to get your name on the list for the night. So so so good.
- Bistronomy by Nico is my 2nd fave. Italian, seafood, fun, it's everything.

Hope you guys enjoy your trip and be sure to check out The Brick bar downtown. It's owned by Matthew Quillen who used to be the Hokie Bird back in the day. Great people and great vibes!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Googles newer OS (Sony) and LG's webOS are the only two worth a damn

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.

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.

+1

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.

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.