YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Honey, I shrunk the TV

7 points cakehonolulu 11 hours ago 16 comments

cakehonolulu 11 hours ago | parent

How I found out I could get a 2026+ TV feature working on a (Year) older one and a few other rants.

roughly 1 hour ago | parent

“Why would Samsung do this?” Because they are a deeply, deeply consumer hostile brand. Do not buy Samsung consumer products, no matter what the feature set and price tag look like. They are not trying to provide you with a good or service in exchange for money, they are trying to take as much of your money as they can.

cakehonolulu 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah… fair enough. I’m honestly a noob when it comes to TV/Audio equipment so it doesn’t surprise me that I picked one of the worst brands out of the bunch… hah!

roughly 36 minutes ago | parent

I mean, spec sheets and all that, they seem like they'd be good, but they're just insanely predatory as a brand at this point. I learned it the same way you did.

wildzzz 46 minutes ago | parent

I've regretted nearly every Samsung device I've ever purchased. The only one I've ever been pleased with were the Galaxy Buds Pro (gen 1). I bought the gen 2s after I thought I lost my first pair but found them a month later. Those gen 2 buds have always been flakey. They take a few extra seconds longer to connect, sometimes one doesn't connect until I dock it and try again or if it does connect, it has staticy or garbled audio on just one bud. I also have an awful time getting them to switch to other devices. Connecting them to my steam deck requires telling the deck to forget them and then re-pair. Meanwhile, the gen 1 buds just work. Battery life is not great on them anymore but they last long enough for my typical daily use.

donkeylazy456 39 minutes ago | parent

which TV vendors you recommend then?

roughly 37 minutes ago | parent

I have a Sony Bravia that was ludicrously pricy but seems to have been made by people who genuinely love what they do. It's got rough edges, but it's a very well-behaved product. Among other things, you can basically disable all the Google Home stuff and have it run as a borderline "dumb" TV.

(I'm aware of Sony's history here. Ain't no saints in this business, I'm afraid.)

donkeylazy456 28 minutes ago | parent

It's a shame that Sony does not run TV business in here, South Korea anymore. All we have is Samsung/LG and Chinese vendors like TCL/Xiaomi.

My best try is jailbroken LG OLED.

dcrazy 27 minutes ago | parent

Sony sold its TV business to TCL early this year: https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/sony-just-handed-its-tv-busine...

roughly 7 minutes ago | parent

Huh, interesting. I’m glad I’m in a place to be able to sit on my hands for a few years. Could be OK, but the Bravías are really pretty special.

contingencies 31 minutes ago | parent

55" is the 'sweet spot' for value. Within that, either (1) just buy whatever and don't EVER connect wifi (if possible, cut the antenna); or (2) if you can find it, get a signage-targeting system which doesn't come 'smart' with Android, this means you can rely on longer use and no surveillance (eg. no microphone) however you may not get the same visual results as a TV-market screen.

Option 2 is a frequent HN recommendation, recently I tried it and bought an ~AUD$400 55" signage screen which would be ~AUD$1000-1200 for a lower-end Android device with surveillance. The visual caliber is not perfect however I can rest easy knowing it's not recording all my household conversations and uploading it to the advertising databases. For the price I can buy something 3 times over before I'm at the same capital outlay, and get upgrades along the way. As my main requirement was 'big' (had to be comfy to watch on a relatively distant couch) this basically checked all the boxes.

asdfqwertzxcv 1 hour ago | parent

I went through the cabled vs wireless run around with Q-Symphony as well until I just settled on using wireless.

The main, unsolved issue was getting the Samsung remote to also work as the cable box remote. Spent 2 full days working on that, to no avail. This will be the last Samsung TV I ever buy. It's back to projectors or industry display TVs for me.

cakehonolulu 1 hour ago | parent

I actually recall seeing an option on my TV to set up the Samsung remote as a ‘universal’ controller. I haven’t had the need to do so because I have a Philips Sync Box that handles HDMI-CEC for me (So I can basically use the TV’s controller on the devices connected to the Sync Box).

Oddly enough (At least in my model) the ‘trigger’ to setup the universal remote is within the ‘input sources’ menu?

deltarholamda 1 hour ago | parent

I get that running seven different kinds of cables everywhere was a bit of a faff, but honestly I miss those days now that I have to be an electrical engineer, a computer systems analyst and a network engineer just to have my TV play sounds.

(And I still have to turn the subtitles on because I can't quite hear what the people on the TV are saying.)

cakehonolulu 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly. I in part, chose this setup to avoid running cables; I figured that technology has come a long way… but here we are unfortunately.