Re: surround sound, it can be a pain to set up right. It’s easier if you use a 5.1 sound bar system with an HDMI input that can then stream to its surround speakers and subwoofer wirelessly. I think several companies make those now (Best Buy should have a bunch on display). Make sure your TV has eARC for outputting to the sound bar (it should).
Sonos used to be good for this, but their new app has been terrible (their CEO was fired over it) and I can’t recommend it anymore. There are many other brands that do the same thing and cost much less.
If you do it the old way with optical/toslink or component cables, you’ll often have to tinker with audio video sync issues and that gets to be a pain real fast.
A couple other suggestions:
Don’t use the built in software of your TV unless you want a slow, janky, and ad-filled experience. Don’t ever finish setup or connect it to the internet. Instead, just use it as a dumb TV and connect a separate Apple TV (best performance), Nvidia Shield (best Android TV), Google TV (cheap but fine) or Roku/Fire TV etc.
Make sure all your HDMI cables are of a recent spec, capable of supporting 4k 60Hz or whatever you watch at.
Consider (only if you want) buying a cheaper TV more frequently. The technology changes quickly enough that buying a $500 one today and a $500 one five years from now will let you have better picture quality over time rather than spending $1000 today and hoping it keeps up with technology for a decade. They’re all mass-produced disposable commodities and even the highest end TVs today will be worthless in a few years. You can sell or recycle the old ones…
OLED rocks where you can keep the ambient light levels down. Blacks are infinite.
Biggest mistake people make is sitting too far away from the screen. You want to have iMAX FOV ( field of view )
7’ for a 65" screen. With poorer sources sitting a bit further is helpful but to get the best out of 4k HDR 6-7’ is ideal.
I’ve followed HD TV since 1980s when I had a 50" Mitisubishi and saw a closed circuit version of the Japanese analogue LaserDisc at CES in Chicago.
Chased that PQ for a along time but it has been easily surpassed in the past 5 years.
I have a few reference BluRay 4k discs just to see how much better they are than the streaming 4k which is often compressed.
David Attenboroughs stuff on BR 4k is always reference.
As a broke pensioner I’ve had to wait on OLED tho I played with one for a week a few years back. I really would like the infinite blacks but I’m okay with the $160 55" 4k HDR10 Samsung I scored two years ago.
Have not seen an OLED under $200 but a few $500-700.
Source, lighting and distance to screen are all important. Most of the models out there are excellent if the source and distance are correct.
My friends think I am crazy (and I might be) because I have a 4K DVD library of movies and a DVD player that is excellent and can do 4K easily rather than the streamed “4K.”
I had my brother over recently and we watched a movie (from a Blu-Ray I was playing) and even he remarked that it looked really good (not a thing he’d usually notice).
Not sure if you can get good Blu-Ray players anymore. (mine is no longer made)
Monoprice is still great, but Best Buy isn’t THAT bad these days. A few years ago they changed their practices, and there’s now a line of “Best Buy Essentials” that’s pretty reasonable, e.g.:
At the higher ends (e.g. an 8k, long, in-wall ultra-high-speed HDMI 2.1 cable) Monoprice will still beat out Best Buy. But for your typical “oops I forgot a cable” home use, Best Buy is fine as long as they have the cheaper cables in stock (they don’t always). They sell both ripoff cables and reasonable ones in-store and online these days.
(And FWIW, Best Buy in general has improved a lot since the 2000s and 2010s… it’s where I get most of my electronics now. They price-match Amazon and a bunch of other stores, accept local returns even if you originally bought it online, have a 60-day return policy with a cheap membership, etc. Costco is another good place. Both can be easier than dealing with the flood of crappy anonymous 3rd-party sellers that have largely taken over Amazon.
And especially with something like a TV, dealing with local returns if you don’t like it can be a lot easier than trying to ship it back to Amazon.)
I bought my current OLED set from Best Buy partly because they would deliver and set it up. And when my parents still had a 35" CRT television, I had them buy the flatscreen set that replaced it from Best Buy because they would pick up and dispose of that 300 pound monster.
The first thing I always do is research Consumer Reports to see what they have reviewed lately. Wirecutter is good but they aren’t as independent as Cosumer Reports.
Your public library will have Consumer Reports if you don’t have a subscription.
Then I’d look at Costco. Excellent customer service and easy returns even for items ordered online and delivered.
I think they are a regular offering. My worry was that the big studios would stop producing them…especially the BBC and would leave us with the tender mercies of high compression streaming.
They used to be really good, but they seem to be unable to keep up with the flood of models now in the marketplace (i.e. of the models they review, they do a good job, but there’s a lot they don’t cover anymore).
These days, rtings.com seem to do a similar (but much, MUCH more detailed job… with sometimes too much data) job: TV Reviews - RTINGS.com
One thing about streaming with TV’s is that the internal streaming platform inside the TV may be substandard. The TVs have streaming as a selling point, but they want to keep their costs low. Sometimes the TV manufacturers scrimp on the streaming components and the platform may be slow, have low memory, may crash occasionally, etc. But sometimes the TV streaming platform may work fine as well. Start off with the TV streaming platform, but if you find it slow or buggy, look into an external streaming device like a Roku or FireTV device. The external devices will be purpose-built for streaming and the performance will probably be better.
I wouldn’t even do this. Sometimes the moment you connect it to the internet, it will download new firmware that enables new ads which cannot be disabled, sometimes enable spying on you (via built in microphones and sometimes secret cameras) that then get sold to third parties for telemetry or uploaded to random tracking servers in Asia. (I’m not making this stuff up. Too lazy for cites right now, but you can look it up. It’s a long history across different manufacturers.)
Never connect those things to the internet. Never download a firmware update unless you absolutely need it in order to fix some significant issue. If you do, change your wifi password right afterward so it can’t connect again afterward.
TVs are races-to-the-bottom commodities that don’t really make a lot of money for their manufacturers. They have to add these shitty streaming & tracking services in order to recoup some of their costs. Like Google’s ad supported services, you’re not really the customer… the third parties they sell your data to are. They’re not incentivized to make a good streaming experience for you as the TV buyer. They very much ARE incentivized to monetize your eyeballs and behaviors to resell to advertisers and data brokers.
You are welcome to your opinion but not having a smart TV connected to the internet smacks of tinhat mindset. It’s easy enough to deal with ads and not lose all the positive things the internet connection brings.
I agree to point with firmware …only in the sense that one should check reviews for the latest firmware issues before going ahead…do not set to automatic. That goes for computers, phones, TVs and watches. Updates are sometimes a disaster.
Yes, an opinion is all it is… but there’s nothing a smart TV’s built-in software would do better than an external streaming device. It’s all risk with no upside. If you like disruptive ads and slow performance, go ahead, but otherwise there’s really no reason to use the built-in stuff. It’s not paranoia, it’s just how their business model works…
e.g. for Vizio, only 3% of their profits come from actually making & selling the TV hardware, the rest is from advertising and selling your data:
The article mentions a company trying to take this idea one step further: https://www.telly.com/
The TV itself is free, a 4k 55". It just shows you ads all day.
I’ve worked on the firmware for Roku TVs, which included models from Hisense, TCL, Sharp, Haier, Insignia, Hitachi and I’m sure several others that I’m not remembering. There were definitely ads and some data collection going on, which may have included data on what shows were being watched. But there were certainly no hidden microphones or cameras in any of the TVs I worked on. The idea seems rather ludicrous to me. Besides the cost of the hardware itself (and believe me, margins are razor-thin: we spent a lot of time and energy debating whether a 1-cent part would be worth adding), the idea of maintaining a server farm capable of handling the gargantuan data stream from millions of microphones or cameras(!!!) seems out of the question. If there were a camera or microphone in the TV, they would probably advertise it as a feature.
Oh, sure! Like we’re supposed to believe you, Mr. Roku-Inside-Man! How much are they paying you to suppress the truth! (j/k)
I have a couple of lower end Roku TV’s and the streaming platform is painful to use. I have to pause a second or two after pressing a remote button to wait for the TV to move the cursor on the screen. With that kind of performance, Roku shouldn’t have even bothered being in a TV with slow hardware. It gives such a bad impression of Roku that people may think Roku is bad rather than the TV’s hardware is to blame. My high end TV at least has good streaming performance, but it crashes and hangs occasionally when streaming.I have external Roku streaming devices hooked up to all my TV’s (including the high end one with Android), since they give a more consistent and better performing streaming experience than the native TV.
One other advantage of an external streaming device is that you can take it with you when you travel. Just hook it up to the HDMI port in any TV and you’ll have all of your streaming apps right there no matter where you are. Just make sure you don’t forget it when you head back home.
One thing I wish I had understood before buying a 65" LED television from Samsung a few months ago: smart televisions now have built in software to show ads in the user interface and during paused content. I did find a Samsung website promoting their advertising system to potential advertisers, and it emphasizes how your ad will be shown to the user right away when they turn the set on, capturing their attention before they can get to any other advertisers. The advertising software even has features like letting you choose and order products and services using the television’s remote control.
I gather this is more or less true of all televisions, but also think Samsung may be relatively worse.
Yeah, it’s a problem. TV manufacturers would typically come to us having already decided on the hardware they would use, and we would do our best to make our software run well on it. But you can’t make a silk purse out of a bottom-of-the-barrel CPU, so performance is often limited by the hardware.
