Our LCD TV is almost 2 decades old. If we upgrade, I can guarantee we won't be connecting it to the Internet. Also none of our smart appliances are connected to the Internet.
You won’t get a choice; they will come with a 5G connection that doesn’t ask you, doesn’t notify you, doesn’t cost you, and has no user-visible toggle. Like cars do these days. And a mesh-networking fallback so if you’re in a city and your neighbour also has one of the similar brand it will connect through their internet instead.
I am actually surprised at how well our second TV (Samsung) still looks [0] after 17 years. We inherited from my sister who bought it for some ridiculous amount of cash for the time. It’s heavy and runs hot, but doesn’t look any worse than cheap TVs of the same size today.
It very likely depends on what you are playing on it and what size it is.
Even most cheap TVs now a days are 4k even if the panel is low end.
There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k which is usually quite noticeable if the TV is large but if it is a smaller size I can see how it would be less obvious.
> There is a large difference between 1080p and 4k
I cannot tell the difference at normal viewing distances. Up close, sure.
This is how they get you to buy the 4K version, in the store you are standing 2 feet from the screen and you can see the pixels at 1080. Sitting at a normal viewing distance and 1080 looks great.
Actually large LCDs (>65") were pretty uncommon in 2010 but if you ever watched a 1080p DLP television I would be surprised if you didn't notice when looking at them side by side.
There is also of course the issue where people have bad internet (so netflix or whatever destroys the bit-rate, or they have the cheaper 1080p only plan... is that still a thing?) or old cable boxes plugged into 4k televisions.
There is a lot that people can do to inadvertently destroy their image quality without knowing which is not great.
Problem is I am not looking at TVs side by side. I'm watching a movie or a show, and the enjoyment I get at the correct viewing distance is unlikely to be significantly more on a 50" or smaller TV.
I bought the top of the line TV from Samsung in 2011. The 'smart' functionality services went offline after a year or two, which means all 'smart' functions no longer work and I am now happily using it as a dumb TV.
Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
> Eventually every smart TV becomes dumb when they inevitably shut down the backend services.
Except that on newer tvs all the nagging will still be there, all the ads will be "frozen" in time (mine has ads for stuff from 2023, the last time I connected it for some firmware update that _GASPS_ actually fixed some things) and some features may depend on internet connectivity. The manufacturer may care to release a final update and solve these issues, but you know they are much more likely to fraudulently just disable features that worked offline as a last middle finger.
Repeat with me, SaaS is fraud. Proprietary digital platforms are fraud.
I think you underestimate how shameless the vendors can be. I imagine in a couple of years the TVs will refuse to function unless periodically connected to the Internet to get updated ads and an updated firmware so that you can't jailbreak them...
I'd like to hear more how that could work. If I get a new TV and never configure it for access from Day 1, how would it connect to the Internet or some unknown service with I guess Internet access as a proxy? On its own?
