[TACD]

This is exactly what we did. Our ‘television’ was never hooked up to actually receive broadcast signal, we’ve always just used it as a big screen for the media/gaming PC set up in the lounge, and at some point I realised if I’m going to spend my evenings staring at Good Screen I might as well upgrade from this 40” 1080p TV with a dead pixel row.

So I looked around and eventually bought a Philips 559M1 55” monitor instead. The price difference compared to an actual TV is a little tough to swallow (~£1,200 vs £?00), but the size, the resolution, and the overall picture / sound quality upgrade is very nice. The HDR leaves a lot to be desired but that’s probably inevitable when getting an LCD panel instead of OLED (which was not considered because of the likelihood of burn-in).

Worth it? Eh… maybe. When compared against the available market for “TV-sized monitor” or upgrading from 1080p, absolutely. But if you’re coming over from an equivalent-sized OLED TV, you’ll be paying a hefty amount for a visual downgrade, just to escape the ‘smart’ features.

[Brian_K_White]

Monitors are now starting to go smart. Not just the Apple one.

And you no longer always have the option to prevent a net connection unless you live in a faraday cage.

The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.

I doubt that will happen. The people that even know or care at all are few, and even fewer of those vocal.

[chrisjc]

> Monitors are now starting to go smart.

This an understatement!

I recently watched a review for one of Samsung's new monitors and it turns out you don't even need to connect it to any source.

I don't just mean media sources like Netflix, Amazon, TV, etc... You can literally connect to MS Office and perform trivial desktop activities on it once you connect a mouse and keyboard.

All of this at a pretty compelling price even if you take all of this bloat out of the equation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pVapqSSccc

> The only way they won't all be smart eventually is if there is a market for dumb monitors that outweighs what the manufacturers make from putting remote agents into them.

And really, if one of the manufactures is doing this, they all have to... There will be no way to compete with those that are able to lower the cost of their product by subsidizing it through these agents. The average consumer isn't savvy enough to understand this difference and chose the "better" product.

[Brian_K_White]

good god... every screen is an all-in-one.

Kicker is, I don't even necessarily mind that as far as it goes.

As time goes on it's just sort of inevitable that more and more functions get performed by little computers instead of hardcoded electronics.

There is some engineering argument against that. It makes systems more complex and thus less robust and generally less performant.

It's just that it also makes them more flexible and in some ways makes the hardware simpler even though a cpu is more complex than a few diodes. It's simpler once a cpu is taken as a black box unit where the complex magic is all hidden inside, and it's cost to design and produce is amortized to nothing by economy of scale. And it allows for potential better perfmance through tuning that isn't available in a fixed system.

So fundamentally as a general rule applied to just any random thing, you can't really say the cpuization of more and more ordinary devices and functions is necessarily a net negative.

What makes it all bad is only who controls all these cpus and what purposes they put them to.

If my freaking tv was open source, fully open including all the special modules for wifi and hdmi and booting etc, I would have no problem at all that my monitor now has a cpu and ram and net connection. Or at least a whole lot less problem.

It's only that "Who is this stuff working for?" that makes it bad.

I wish I could somehow poison the money I pay for the TV with my own agenda against the wishes of the manufacturer and retailer the way they have my tv. So that the money would somehow do my bidding after I gave it to them, just the way the tv does for them after they gave it to me.

[JohnFen]

Maybe it will be necessary to do what has to be done with newer cars: physically disable the radio transceiver.

[blable2]

Uh oh... this comment brings it to the front of my mind and seems correct.

[kjs3]

We should start a bidding pool for which monitor manufacturer starts stuffing ads onto the screen first.

[MandieD]

This will make you feel better about that 1200 GBP: we're still rocking the 55" 1080p Sony Bravia we bought in 2010 for 2000 EUR.

I am also delighted to hear that a 55" 4K monitor can be had for well under 2000 EUR, and will gladly do that when the Bravia finally bites the dust, because that's the only way we are taking that thing off the wall over the piano!

[everyone]

Afaik the difference between whats called a "monitor" and whats called a "TV" nowadays is that..

TV's show a compressed or upscaled image. TV's have much higher latency.

And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.

[oynqr]

Having a TV work well as a monitor is usually just a few settings away. It was this way ten years ago.

[gruez]

>TV's show a compressed or upscaled image

TVs can show a "compressed or upscaled image", but that doesn't mean it can't show uncompressed full resolution images (ie. HDMI input). In that regard they aren't that different from monitors.

>TV's have much higher latency.

>And thats why something called a monitor is so much more expensive for the same size display.

This is more due to their firmware containing image processing logic (to improve image quality), than TVs being intrinsically lower quality than computer monitors.

[navjack27]

Pretty much this. My TCL 4K HDR TV I bought two years ago for like 400 bucks has Roku in it and... I just ignore it. I use game mode on it and it's hooked up to my M1 Mac Mini all day long. I use Parsec when I'm lazy and use my desktop PC that way on it. Sometimes I'll Parsec the other way around from my PC to the Mac while it's displaying on the TV and there is absolutely zero latency that is perceivable when watching a video and the sound on in both places.

No ads ever bother me. No camera to scan me. It doesn't do anything. Even when I disabled my AD blocker on my router it didn't go ape.

[baq]

Most TVs nowadays have a 'Game' input setting which disables most latency-impacting post-processing. Always check before buying, though.