My approach is to compartmentalise functionality. I have a dumb screen with a Chromecast plugged into it. The screen is the much more expensive part of this setup, but should last for a long time. It supports inputs which will almost certainly be usable, perhaps with dongles towards the end of its service, for at least a decade, if past tech is anything to go by.

The Chromecast could be discontinued tomorrow, but it only cost £30, so I'll just replace it with whatever. Relying on your expensive TV's probably terrible and badly supported software is madness, but it's what most people seem happy to do. It's getting harder and harder to buy TVs that are not smart, and I find it maddening.

I take the same approach with Speakers.

I'll add to this: absolutely no good can come from plugging your TV specifically into the Internet. None. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

As soon as you do you'll get nagged for software updates, you'll get told the privacy policy or the terms of service have changed (which you have to acknowledge) and apps for things like Youtube and Netflix tend to be inferior to those in boxes (eg Roku, AppleTV).

I buy my TV to be a dumb screen. Then I plug a Roku into it. If at some point I decide the Roku isn't working I throw it away and get something else. Worst case I'm out $120.

Exactly. My TV and DVD player would very much like to know my router's wifi password so they can connect to the internet. Ain't gonna happen.

Is that even possible anymore? About 2-3 years ago it seems like "smart" TVs completely took over.

I bought a Samsung 65" 1080p "Smart" TV 2.5 years ago where that seems possible.

Oh, gotcha, I misread your original post. I thought you were talking about truly "dumb" TVs.

Non-smart TVs basically don't exist anymore (Sceptre is the only brand I can find). You can usually get a smart TV and keep it off the internet, but I've seen horror stories of some TVs not working at all until being "updated" after unboxing.

We need a law that requires things work out of the box and can work while not connected to the net. Bonus points for requiring off switches for the "smart" features.

A similar pet peeve of mine is that the huge infotainment screens on modern cars cannot be turned off the majority of the time. Only in the VW Golf I rented did it actually have a way to shut the whole thing down.

I bought a Visio specifically because it could be dumb relatively recently (1-2 years).

I think a dumb screen option will always be available because it's always going to be a value player in a world of Sony and Samsungs. The question is will the screen be a nice enough panel.

My experience has been that you have to pay extra for a dumb TV right now, likely because of issues of scale. My last TV was an NEC E-series Commercial Display. Aside from not being encumbered by any smart-features, it has a serial port on it, to make automation even easier.

But I could have saved a lot of money by going with a conventional Smart TV, and it would have been easier to shop for it. Commercial displays aren't hanging on the wall at your local Best Buy, although they might be hanging on the wall at your local bar, restaurant, bank, etc.

Even the budget Vizios now have smart features.

Do you mean - "Vizio"?

I agree, but this is not always possible. I was in the market for a new TV set couple of months ago and all the models with a great image technology come with the "smart tv" built in.

It is not possible to buy a high-end panel without it anymore.

Sure, but it's totally possible to just sit on the sofa and watch it rather than type in your wifi password and connect it to the internet.

AS long as you just use it as a dumb screen, physically disconnected from the network, it'll keep doing it's job for year and years.

My TV is a Smart TV. I've never use that part of it. In fact, it came with a second remote control for managing the Smart features and I've never even put batteries in it let alone given the panel network access.

It's been happily humming along in dumb mode for about 4 years I think. Just plug a cheap accessory of your choice in (Fire TV, Chromecast, Roku, self built HTPC etc) and enjoy!

Non-smart TVs are mostly inferior panels now, as I understand it.

It may be about time to buy only dumb monitors, and buy the television tuner portion as a separate box, if you even still need one.

Of all the television sets I have owned since 1985, the native tuner included inside the device has been used maybe 2% of the time. The only advantage I have ever seen from buying a display screen as a television set is that it comes with speakers loud enough to hear from across a large room, and has as many as six different input ports. None of the screens I now own currently decode their own NTSC/ATSC/QAM signals.

My first "smart" TV was also my last, because LG made it obsolete within months of me buying it. Now it also functions only as a dumb screen, and is not allowed on my home network. Never again.

You don't need a smart television now. You don't even need a television. You need a monitor with HDMI inputs and speakers.

I went down this path a few years ago. You're right, but monitors of size X tend to be much more expensive than TVs of size X. At least they did a few years ago.

Monitors are less expensive at small sizes, I think. But otherwise I would agree.

And at this point, I would be willing to pay slightly more to not pack stuff into the case that I don't want, which may negatively impact the features that I do want.

And if you want a DisplayPort input in lieu of one of the HDMI sockets, that seems to add at least $30 to an otherwise identical monitor, even though DisplayPort is royalty-free. There does seem to be an attempt to segment the market to charge more for displays connected to a computer than for displays connected to a home entertainment appliance.

At larger sizes, I think the assumption is that if you don't have a TV tuner, you're attaching it to a computer, and if you do, you're not. And that breaks down at smaller sizes, where resolution and pixel pitch become an issue for computing, but less so for consoles and DVD players.

I use the tuner, but, on the other hand, some budget TVs don't even have them. But like the other guy said, I haven't seen a lot of great deals on 65" monitors.

For large sizes like that, I think you may be able to get good deals on a sort of larger dumb monitor that is used in airports to display flight information, and to a lesser extent rotating decks of static advertisements. They aren't typically sold direct to consumers. I'm not sure whether their pixel response times are good enough for regular entertainment video streams, though.

I haven't done much digging on this, since 40" is plenty for the longest line-of-sight possible in my house.

Yeah, that sounds pretty not-worth it to me.

Maybe...? It is certainly the case that many non-smart TVs are focused on the signage industry. They might be brighter and more saturated than a conventional TV. They might be less capable of displaying smooth motion. On the other hand, they're built to be somewhat more sturdy and with more professional features. They have additional mounting features, serial port controls, and the build quality to run 24/7.

I'm using an NEC E-series 55" commercial display as my TV and gaming monitor. It's not a great TV, but it is solid and it's way better than the one it replaced.

Do you have to configure it?

If it's never connected to the network....

I don't think so

This is vague; inferior panels vs what? Smart TVs? Monitors? Projectors?

I thought the meaning was clear. The good panels are put in smart TVs and not non-smart ones, so even if you have no interest in using smart features the smart TV may be a better choice.

Exactly. If you want an OLED TV, you get a smart TV whether you want that or not. I’d rather buy a dumb TV, but that’s becoming less of an option for higher end TVs.

Can't you turn a smart TV into a dumb TV?

Ditto. My chromecast just stopped working with my perfectly working 5 year old TV. Same chromecast works on newer monitors or TVs...google are just ignoring

With a smart TV there's at least the option to just switch to an external device and ignore the entire smart part of the TV. You're not really in a worse place than if you had bought a non-smart TV (unless the smart TV software actually breaks in some way that interferes with regular operations, which isn't entirely unrealistic).

But in many other cases of smart devices where the core function relies on external services, they'll be entirely useless.

Smart TV software can and will interfere with regular operations. My girlfriend's dad got a shiny new Smart TV for Christmas a few years back. He also lives in the sticks and has satellite internet that works maybe every other day.

I volunteered to set it up, and what do you know -- the "OS" was gated by a registration / sign in screen. So, no way to access core functionality (including external inputs, settings menu, etc.) without an internet connection. Even if there was some strange ritual that would let me get through (there wasn't), the average user is fucked.

What make is this? Just for future reference so I know to never buy a TV from this manufacturer!

Not exactly. Keep in mind the UEFI debacle with both Intel and AMD. Having an unknown attack vector on an old TV is less than desirable.

Aside from privacy, I like to think of it similar to musical keyboards. Back when synths were primitive, it made sense to buy a keyboard that had builtin speakers, synthesizer software/hardware - a smart keyboard if you will. Nowadays, the only thing you would want is a good set of keys. That means a midi controller with a baby grand/grand like keybed. [1] Best of all, it should be a lot cheaper than an all in one. And itll be just as good in 20 years as it is now - youll just run a different synth on your computer. All in ones dont make sense for many things. It may be a trend but its an overzealous and oversold one. Ill stick with my dumb midi instruments and my dumb projector. And hopefully theyll still be with me in 5 or more years.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatar

I can just pull the network cable from the TV, which removes pretty much the entire attack surface.

The problem with the Link is more or less "devices" that rely on the network for core functionality. So I'm not sure that a smart TV is the best parallel, as most of them from what I know will work without the Internet.

To go with the music world, the best parallel would be the increasingly annoying tendency for music software to move to "cloud" based offerings or other Internet authorization techniques. For instance Roland, with their "cloud plugins", apparently thinks all music venues have super spiffy wifi, as they require network authorization every time the plugin loads in the DAW. (https://www.rolandcloud.com/faq#FAQLink17) If Roland ever pulled this authorization scheme, poof, your plugins no longer work.

I have a 16 year old keyboard (Alesis Andromeda) and a synth that is a bit over a quarter of a century old (Roland D-50), and they both work fine more or less (a few issues here and there but nothing that stops me from using it). They don't need an Internet connection just to work. The companies can discontinue support (or even go bankrupt, in Alesis's case), and the synths still work.

Personally, I certainly do not have great confidence that the Roland Cloud authorization service will last a quarter century.

Hardware that requires the Internet to work is no different than software that requires the Internet to work, it honestly is a risky prospect for longevity. The Harmony Link from what I see was released in 2011. Maybe 7 years is a long time in this current disposable electronics world, but it doesn't feel like that to me.

A do not put any wifi credentials into the TV. Ever.

It will forever try to login into that wifi network, even if you disabled the wifi in the tv ui.

You're going to need to be more specific. Even if there was a TV that did this, you can't generalize and say that all TVs do it.

In my case, it was Samsung UE46F5570.

Sure, all TVs will probably not do that, but before this one it wouldn't occur to me, that it could do that.

Lesson learned.

I don't use the smart features of any tv either, mostly because the smarts evolve faster than my tv will and I'd rather just plug them into the TV, or through a receiver.

What about the ones with wireless connectivity and no hardware kill switch for it?

The smart TV can't log into a WiFi network when it doesn't know the password. And I don't think that there are any smart TVs with an embedded mobile phone data connection that you can't shut off.

My neighbor might run an unsecured network. Poorly designed software in a smart tv might cause my device to auto-join an open network. In this case, locking down my own WiFi would be irrelevant to the television.

This type of behavior was the cause of new Apple Watches that couldn’t access the net over 3G (they were trapped on captive WiFi networks with no UI to disconnect). If this happened with one device, it could happen with others.

edit: split a run on sentence

Every smart TV has WiFi. Even if you switch WiFi off, its not always off, on many devices.

Even if wifi isn't truly off, as long as it's not authenticated to a wifi network before it's turned off it is a measure more safe. If it looks for open networks... that's another thing.

I hate playing the "idiot, its obvious. downvoted" target. HN can be so vicious at times when you would expect someone else to fill in the junior level details. I guess my lesson is to include even the simple blackhat explanations. HN is probably lacking of that kind of crowd...maybe to a boon.

Anyhow, you are all wrong to disagree with me. There were just CVEs for radio chip exploits a couple of days ago! These have been coming out quite often lately. The layer at which these exploits can be done does not require the TV to be on any network. Not even ad-hoc. Just the fact that it has a listening radio chip that has old firmware is enough to make it extremely dangerous [digitally.] That TV can literally became a wifi enabled worm distribution center, infecting everything in your home. Not worth the risk IMO. I would stick with a dumb TV.

"targets didn't have to connect to the attacker's Wi-Fi network. Simply having Wi-Fi turned on was sufficient to being hacked."

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information-tec...

I didn't downvote ya. Nor did I get any upvotes on this comment. You have a number of valid points - I wasn't aware of any issues if wifi is disabled.

Dumb TV's with sufficient quality are becoming harder and harder to find. I prefer to plug in my own smarts to TV's since they evolve quicker than the years I'll own a TV.

True - projectors should be easier to get as dumb devices. I have a wired Epson projector that provides 4k.

Unless you paid a premium for the "smart" features.

My understanding is that it costs the manufacturer something like $5 difference to put what's essentially a Roku into a TV to make it "smart" (which kind of makes sense as you can buy a Roku stick for $30 retails and it has to have a case, cable, box, external hdmi connector, power etc.).

The manufacturer then sells the smart tv at a $25-50 premium over the dumb version and it's a decent profit for them.

FWIW - I was always skeptical of the onboard TV smart features, but the Samsung TV that I use a computer monitor actually is actually surprisingly decent.

Could you please specify what model of Samsung TV?

It was the 2016 model of this:

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Electronics-UN55MU6500-Curved...

As an aside, I absolutely love using it as a monitor hooked up to a MBP.

But you probably didn't since at this point it's difficult to find a high end TV that doesn't have some crappy OS built into it.

Chromecast will work, it's relatively cheap so if it stops working after an X amount of years it's less of a financial pain than having to buy a new TV for the same functionality. The other side of the throw-away society and/or planned obsolescence is that replacing things becomes cheaper. I mean there's probably even cheaper alternatives than the Chromecast if you're on a budget.

What's wrong with using your computer and an HDMI cable? I really don't understand this whole smart TV thing

3 C's: cost, convenience, and complexity.

First, price. I think this is the biggest factor. You need a computer (for each TV). I don't think there are too many computers (if any) in the $35-$150 range that can handle smoothly playing HD video and pushing it to an external display. Assuming the machine isn't dedicated and you already own it, it breaks point 2 below.

Second, I haven't seen a good setup for controlling a computer connected to a TV. Granted, I stopped looking a few years ago. For me (and I'd assume most people), "good setup" means ability to turn system on and control it remotely, at a minimum. I'm sure one exists, but it would definitely require even more hardware (cuts into price) and more custom setup.

Third, some people might not have the technical know-how to set up something that meets the above two things. Sure, plenty of us technical people can do it, but it's not hard to understand that we are the minority.

tl;dr there's nothing "wrong" with using a computer and an HDMI cable, but there are plenty of compelling reasons these days to use one of the ultra cheap boxes. They are basically cheap purpose-specific computers, anyway. Ultimately, different people have different needs and priorities.

I have an HTPC and I mostly just use it as a plex server, with plex player running on a roku. The Roku UI is infinitely better with a remote.

I have a mini-keyboard with touch pad, but it is still inferior to a roku remote or my harmony remote. My wife won't use it.

A dedicated computer for this is quite expensive, and using your regular desktop is somewhat annoying in various aspects like switching screen configurations and often not possible if you don't have the PC near the TV.

Then there are the complications DRM adds, e.g. it's often not possible to get the best quality from Netflix on your PC in the browser, you only get that with the native Windows 10 app (and then not 4K unless you have some very specific GPU and drivers). The Apps on a smart TV or a FireTV/whatever don't have these restrictions.

It's not even the cost, but using a HTPC with the common streaming providers has become quite a chore nowadays, with horrible UX.

With Netflix you at least get an app and the possibility to stream with highest quality (4K, HDR, multichannel sound), but the app is extremely basic and clearly only optimized for touch - it doesn't even offer basic keyboard shortcuts beyond start/stop.

You can get a somewhat near-HTPC using Chrome (at least shortcuts work there) and some customizing, but you're stuck with stereo (I'm not sure about 4K/HDR, but the latter is no-go enough for me to not have tried).

The same goes for Amazon Video, except that they don't even have an app outside Android/iOS, so you're stuck with stereo anyway. And so on. It would be downright embarassing, if it weren't so obvious this is intentional...

Raspberry Pi + surf = Youtube, Netflix, Hulu, Etc. fullscreen with desktop interface.

HTPC

books, on paper?