One alternative is the Gigabyte AORUS FO48U 48" 4K OLED. This essentially an LG OLED, minus the smart TV stuff, plus better inputs. It seems to have a ~15% price premium over the TV.

Gigabyte does not do business in good faith. I am extremely leery of anything related to them now; they are not a safe brand.

https://www.windowscentral.com/gigabyte-allows-returns-or-ex...

Hm, don't want to side with with Gigabyte here, but drawing a conclusion from a test of a PSU enduring 120% load for an extended period of time failing would not make me dismiss all their products.

>from a test of a PSU enduring 120% load for an extended period of time failing

That's from gigabyte's response, not the accusations levied against them. In GN's testing, they found that the PSU failed at 60% load after 72 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACtT_rzToI&t=1427s

Well, that is definetly not okay. Would never consider buying something else than a motherboard from gigabyte, but i prefer Asus anyway.

They're fucking shit. I've had to replace once twice here and it's less than 50% of the stated load.

There's a Be Quiet unit in there now like the rest of the PCs in my place.

Have been happy with their Aorus GPU, a 1080TI Xtreme, however their software suite turned into a pile of shit.

I will not buy another Gigabyte / Aorus card for that reason.

The cheap gigabyte cards are fine. I’ve got a bottom end 1660 and it has been good. But I only use the stock nvidia drivers with it.

Just the power supplies are dog crap.

The card is fine, but if you want to control the oh so annoying lighting...

Fortunately Afterburner will let you take control of the fan etc with a custom profile.

I had a problem with the lighting in my Logitech mouse. I desoldered all the LEDs :)

Not to mention said test is in a general purpose computer and we're talking about a monitor here, with a fixed load.

The max brightness on the FO48U is 385 nits, the LG CX 48 has a max brightness of ~740. That'll really impact the sort of high level HDR features you expect at that price point while paying a premium to use the same Apple TV or Shield Pro as your smart portion.

That could be a nice alternative! In that case you do need a separate tuner though and something like a Chromecast if you want to watch Netflix. And you might not have easy access to extended channel offerings such as watching older episodes on demand etc.

I have literally not used a built-in TV tuner at home for 15 years. It used to be a set-top box for cable/satellite providers, now mostly an AppleTV for streaming services (including for public broadcast like the BBC iPlayer). If/when I replace my TV it'll almost certainly be closer to a TV-sized display with decent built-in speakers.

It would be interesting to see some metrics on the number of people that use tuners on TVs now days.

Why isn't the alternative to keep your TV off the network?

For now, that works.

It's easy to imagine a time when the TV includes it's own 5G modem or that Samsung would make a deal with Amazon or Comcast for access to their wifi mesh networks so the TV can get online without user intervention.

Amazon sidewalk [1] has entered the chat. The article focuses on "neighbors" but I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...

> I'm pretty sure the main use case is to enable smart TVs and other IOT to phone home despite being disallowed.

I highly doubt that. Rolling out this network is a lot of work and I'm nearly 100% certain this is to reduce claims of non-working devices caused by bad WiFi, plus maybe the option to sell network access on a wide range of devices.

Avoiding blocked network for TVs and other "smart" appliances is surely a nice benefit, but I doubt even 1% of people actually block network access (hell, most probably want it!). There's no way Amazon would pour that amount of effort into extracting that minuscule piece of tracking data.

Thanks for posting that. I was trying to remember what it was called and couldn't.

I once moved across the ocean and newly purchased LG TV refused to work because I am now in the wrong region. Off it went to a landfill, this perfect piece of hardware :-(

Refused to work on what way?

There was a dialog window with a error message and a [Continue] button which did nothing.

Wow, that's terrible.

I only know about LGs but they have a service remote that you can use to change the region. Maybe Samsung has a similar thing?

Unbelievable. Not even as a monitor?

How did it know?

I guess it picked up my ip address.

Might have picked it up from the SSID.

This distopyan deal is surely coming soon. And unfortunately may apply to far more type of stuff we take home.

Or segregate it from the network (e.g. using a VLAN). Some folk might need the freeview/on-demand TV apps (if they're trying to avoid having other smart devices for these things (e.g. fire sticks and Apple TVs et al) and these require at least working outbound internet access.

That's the problem of current consumers. The modern TVs have an equivalent no smart same spec screen but only available to corporate users with all the modern inputs just without the smart. If only we could get access to that market.

> If only we could get access to that market.

You often have access to it, it's just a higher price (sometimes double) because it isn't subsidized by advertising.

The subsidies from advertising don't cause thousands of dollars of difference. It's maybe a few dozen, or few hundred at the most. Facebook's yearly revenue per user is about 33 USD, and they probably have a way better grip on your eyeballs. A TV lives about 5 to 7 years.

The way larger component is due to effects of scale which punishes products that run in small batches, and the effect that the "business" version of something is usually more expensive, but available with higher quality, than the consumer version.

You can shop for bare display panels at https://panelook.com

Building the TV receiver part shouldn't be too difficult. Perhaps someone could write a blog about it.

Then you're very welcome to write it if it's that easy /s

I have looked in to fixing a new but broken pc monitor that way but it would end up the same cost as a new monitor, at least in my case.