I’m considering buying a new TV. There’s plenty of posts about trying to find dumb TVs, comments like ‘just don’t connect it to the internet/network’.
What surprises me is that there isn’t a good overview of (popular) TVs or brands with basic information, answering for each TV:
- Can you use it as a basic TV by choosing not to enable smart features during setup?
- Can you opt out by just not accepting a bunch of agreements?
- Does it have a camera and/or microphone? Where in the device are these? Is there a physical disable switch for microphone?
- Does it nag when not connected to any network?
- Does it have higher than normal power usage when not able to phone home?
- Has it been discovered to connect to public WiFi networks? Does it have the (theoretical) ability to connect to 5G mobile networks?
And similar.
There are extensive lists with a lot of detail about VPN services but nothing like that for TVs. Am I ignorant of a good source, or does this just not exist (yet)?
Just set up a TCL and it has a “basic” option which makes it work without anything. I’m still trying to decide if I should buy a Nvidia shield to pair with it so I enabled it “fully” for now, will probably switch it back. It’s basically android so many of these behaviours are just like on android phones
Samsung is known to be one of the more cancerous of ad-ridden “smart” TVs
I haven’t had any issues with my Sony TV but I bought it several years ago and don’t really use it (I generally consume content on my PC with 3 monitors). It is not connected to any network.
Buy a store display meant to show logos and menus. Something like these:
https://www.amazon.com/s?rh=n%3A18746933011&language=en_US&brr=1&ie=UTF8&rd=1
I haven’t evaluated any of them; I just know people talk about them being the only tv screens without smarts.
So I just bought a brand new “dumb” TV for $150 off of Amazon (43" 1080 Sceptre). It isn’t high end in the slightest, but it IS brand new and not some weird old stock and the picture and sound don’t feel too far off from my significantly more expensive higher end LCD TVs. I wanted one that I could put on a rolling stand and move between a few rooms and saw no benefit to 4k at that screen size. Other than that, there are some decent “digital signage” TVs that were decently priced available as well from Samsung and a few other brands. I didn’t see anything that was OLED, but I was burned hard (quite literally with burn-in) on earlier OLED gear, so I am avoiding it until the prices get low enough that I can be fine with the chance that it will be crap after 4-5 years of use.
Can you tell us some of the things to search for so we can find those?
Try “lcd tv non-smart”, “lcd tv hospitality”, or “lcd business tv” or any variations thereof.
Personally, I say F smart tv’s. The smart bit is going to be old and useless in three years. The panel will last me over a decade.
Yes, you can ignore all the nagging and smart stuff and just set it to an hdmi input or something.
Then hooking up a 3rd party smart box is what I recommend.
What I don’t understand is that if you want the TV to be offline, why don’t you just buy a monitor and connect a digital TV receiver to it via an adapter (if it doesn’t have an HDMI output). It’ll be more expensive for sure and it will require a design-hostile antenna but all the privacy issues should just go out of the window.
From trying to get people to do that (with no success), it’s because it seems too much like work. Folks want something they can plug in and go… but plugging in one extra thing is just a bridge too far these days. It’s frustrating as shit.
Can’t relate. Privacy is not a plug and play thing nowadays.
For best privacy, get a monitor and a tv box (like nvidia shield, or roll your own software a single board computer like a raspberry pi). That might be the only way to trust a tv: dont use it at all.