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All smart TVs—from LG, Samsung, TCL, and other brands—collect personal data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit surveillance. (www.consumerreports.org)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 12 points 4 months ago (10 children)

I’ve been rocking a 46 inch Sony xbr 1080p tv for like 22 years. It just broke last week :(

That thing was awesome. It had nine types of inputs, DisplayPort, hdmi, super video, dvi, rca. It even had optical audio in and out. It was a $10,000 tv when it came out and I watched it for a while until it was something like $3300 and I bought it.

I replaced it with a 55inch Samsung for $300. The picture is 22years better :) but the rest of it is throw away junk. It will never get connected to the internet and it will never get a software update. I think this is the logical conclusion to cheap tvs, they just become 100% enshittified.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    You should maybe connect it once for update. At least check firmware update changelogs to see if anything is relevant.

    I have an LG and experienced a weird picture problem for over a year... it was infuriating. Firmware update fixed it.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    You should have just returned it. If it doesn't work out of the box, you don't need it.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Well then i would need to make sure the new screen has the latest firmware.

    I dont think connecting my tv to the internet for 5mins is the end of the world. I'm not THAT paranoid

    Although i noticed that the tv made 100 dns requests the moment it connected

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Privacy issues aside, there have been a lot of instances where a TV manufacturer or other smart device manufacturer loads a whole bunch of anti-features and obnoxious advertising into the interface permanently with a firmware update, with no ability to perform a factory reset to restore it to its original state. That on its own is enough to have convinced me never to connect any expensive device to the internet unless I buy it for that purpose.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    You can make the Samsung even better by turning off the energy saving to make it brighter and turning off the motion smoothing so it doesn't hallucinate extra frames in 24/25/30 fps video.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Is the picture really better though? All the new stuff has image processing crap due to refresh rate mismatches and loads of older content never got a HD release, let alone 4k. I'm never gonna stop watching stuff like Star Trek, and voyager looks like dogshit given it never got a release beyond DVD because of how they did the editing.

    Don't get me wrong, I know you can modify all kinds of settings to minimize the impact of the image processing. Turning off the processing gives you a ton of problems, and enabling the processing can work in some media but doesn't work quite right in others.

    With my home setup the difference between plex, netflix and other streaming services can be pretty big depending on the formats supported by the specific show even. It's all a mess and if you want it to be right odds are you need to really mess with it and even then you only have so many options. Getting a new TV has not been as positive as I hoped for, but i've gotten used to it and just accept that some things look kinda garbage because tweaking one thing often makes one show better, but others might not be as good as a result.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Ya, I think it’s much better to be honest. I hate all the interpolation post processing crap too, but it just turn it all off. I found the old tv has a lot more light bleed from the back panel, and the newer tvs have blacker blacks and more contrast. I do think they are significant upgrades. But everything else is a major downgrade from the number of ports, the durability, the extra crap shoved down my throat, etc.

    But if you use it just like a dumb monitor, it’s a great cheap tv.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    You need to keep the frame rate matching on and motion smoothing off. On an LG you turn "Real Cinema" or "Cinema Screen" on and turn "TruMotion" off. On a Sony, you set "CineMotion" to High and "MotionFlow" on with both sliders set to minimum.

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