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Ask Soylent: Best Bang for Buck Television Purchase

posted by mrpg on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:44PM   
from the i-hate-shopping dept.

Sulla writes:

So one of my three year old kids smashed my 65" LED flatscreen with a die-cast model of the Atlantis shuttle. I was fine with this and was not planning on buying a replacement in any haste but my wife keeps complaining. Would prefer at least 65"+ and absolutely not a smart tv. What suggestions do you have, companies to avoid, etc. Help me SN, you are probably my only hope of not just buying another spysung.

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Original Submission

• No network No network (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @06:41PM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @06:41PM (#625240)

  I agree with the no network statements. We did something similar about a year ago when I had bent the stand by moving the old 45” around. Went to the store, basically no such thing as a TV without a computer in it anymore. So we got a 65” OLED, looks great. When the guys came to install it, they found no Ethernet so went into the settings and asked for my WiFi password. I laughed and explained that this thing will NEVER connect directly to my network, much less the Internet. We push content from the PS4 or a laptop. Works great. It escapes me why the TV industry seems to think that everyone desperately wants their television to be “ZOMG, part of the IoT on the information superhighway in the cloud multimedia!!!”

  Anyway, yeah just don’t connect it to your network and use HDMI cables that are pre-1.4. Iirc you won’t get HDR, but the TV also won’t be able to get Ethernet over HDMI and circumvent your pseudo air gap.

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• Re:No network Re:No network (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:42PM (2 children)

  by hemocyanin (186) on Saturday January 20 2018, @09:42PM (#625326) Journal

  Anyway, yeah just don’t connect it to your network and use HDMI cables that are pre-1.4. Iirc you won’t get HDR, but the TV also won’t be able to get Ethernet over HDMI and circumvent your pseudo air gap.

  Can you explain this more?

  Parent

  • Re:No network Re:No network (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @10:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @10:29PM (#625357)

    Anyway, yeah just don’t connect it to your network and use HDMI cables that are pre-1.4. Iirc you won’t get HDR, but the TV also won’t be able to get Ethernet over HDMI and circumvent your pseudo air gap.

    Can you explain this more?

    The HDMI cable specs have essentially never changed since the first version. However, the ARC and HEC (ethernet) features make use of a pin that was previously unused before HDMI 1.4, so it's possible some non-compliant cable assemblies could have left that pin disconnected and most people wouldn't have noticed.

    I've never even seen a device that supports HEC anyway, and both ends would have to implement it for it to work...

    Parent

    • Re:No network (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:58AM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday January 21 2018, @05:58AM (#625535) Journal

      Thanks -- that's pretty gross - ethernet over video cable is certainly not designed for helping people even if it may have some marginally useful side cases.

      Parent