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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1651 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 1, 2026

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Even voices skeptical of progress will often allow that one of the few unambiguous improvements in cost-adjusted standard of living has been in the realm of TVs. After years of a 14" Thinkpad, a $100 used iPad, various phones, and a couple of e-ink devices, I find myself in the market. Is there anything in the roughly 65" range for $250 that's more worth buying than the rest, or is it just a matter of whatever's on Amazon? Planning to use it as an output for a PC and never connect it to the Internet, generally in fairly dim rooms. Don't need above 60hz, but I have heard that adaptive sync or one of the proprietary versions thereof might be desirable for some of my intended applications (Zwift, lol). Thanks.

pick up a used OLED. any brand will blow any non-OLED out of the water. in my market, you'd be at 55" at your budget.

you'd be at 55" at your budget.

Yeah I think that's probably where I'm at too upon closer investigation. Any important tires to kick for durability or botnet/privacy, when buying used?

Just never setup internet access on the TV and you should be okay in terms of the latter.

Don't modern TVs quietly try to hop on any open WiFi network and to pair with any same-vendor IoT devices in the vicinity to get Internet access?

As far as I know there is zero evidence of this (ie your Sony Bravia parasitically latching onto the neighbors WiFi connection without ever telling you to transmit your data back to the mothership secretly) ever happening with any mainstream TV brand (or indeed any as far as I know). It’s internet hearsay, like claiming Siri or Alexa overheard you talking about your broken vacuum and then Google started showing you ads for a new one. Not only is it rare to find open WiFi networks with no login walls these days, but it would open TV manufacturers to a lot of legal risk.

To be fair, Sony did surreptitiously install rootkits on lots of people's computers that one time, and didn't face crippling legal consequences for doing so. I wouldn't trust their TVs without verification.

You’d probably have to go with some less well known brand like Magnavox or some distributor and manufacturer I’ve never even heard of. Maybe that’s a task for an LLM to do the research on; but the trend of the whole industry has been in one direction for decades now.

I would assume any non-mainstream, "legacy" brand that makes you think "huh, they still make TVs?" (Magnavox, RCA, Westinghouse, Phillips) or unknown brand is just some Chinese company's skinsuit at this point, so I would definitely not trust them over any other. At least there is the possibility of a large Japanese or Korean brand getting repercussions from fucking the consumer over. Yes, it rarely happens, but it could, which is probably informing their decisions. But Chinese brands operate outside of the West's ability to punish or regulate. Cheap Chinese electronics (not their prestige brands like Hisense or TCL with a reputation to lose, those are probably just as bad but no worse than the Japanese or Koreans) spying on people rarely makes the news because we rightfully go "well no shit sherlock", not because it doesn't happen.

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