I got myself a monitor for the first time in 8 years, so needed a different shape and sizes desk. I’m happy with what I ended up with:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B1jeo9bCk04/?igshid=1xfbi5yesfmuf
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New UltraSharp a coming.
I’m not sure if I should get one or two. If I get one, I can get something like this for the second monitor.
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-27gn950-b-gaming-monitor
One monitor great color. One great refresh rate for gaming. Best of both worlds?
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Does it have 144hz refresh at all resolutions?
That remains to be seen.
This particular model isn’t actually that good considering the insane price. It’s just nice to see that there are more companies making large TV-sized monitors. This gives us nerds an escape valve to get away from the “smart” TVs. Some years from now when it’s time to get a new screen, I’m probably going to be getting something along the lines of a 50" 4K OLED monitor.
As promised, the new Dell monitors were made available today. The thing is, I can’t figure out if there’s any difference between the new and the old model.
U2718Q and U2720Q seem to be the same exact screen. The difference is the new one costs $200+ more and has USB-C. That’s a really expensive USB hub you got there.
Gonna keep waiting and looking.
This may or may not be the place for this. But I’m newly in the market for a new TV.
By TV I mean large screen for me to attach my HTPC and switch to. Couple questions. TV or very large monitor? If either, which ones are good?
Almost every TV these days is a “smart TV”. The displays themselves are fine, and the prices are great, but you have to make sure to disable all the smart shit as much as possible, turn of all the Best Buy settings to get proper colors and response times, and never let the TV connect to the Internet.
Very large monitors have the benefit of not having that smart shit. The thing is, price and quality vary a lot. If you’ve got money, they recently announced the Acer Predator CG552k. At least on paper it looks good. There are plenty of 55" OLED Smart TVs available for half the price, but this will run at 120Hz, not have any smart crap, and have IO connectors more in line with what a monitor has compared to a TV.
Another thing you have to watch out for is remote control. Every TV is going to come with a remote. A big monitor might not, which is not idea for a couch situation.
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- If having a remote is at all important to you, the answer is TV.
- It’s nearly impossible to buy a cheap dumb TV. The best practical option is to buy a smart TV and never give it your wifi password. A factory reset should undo this mistake if you accidentally accept terms or someone puts it online.
I went with a cheap 42" Vizio from Costco.
Pros: super cheap, Costco has its own 4y TV warranty, component input in case I want to retrogame with my PS2 or Wii.
Cons: the corners aren’t quite as illuminated as the rest of the screen, and I wish it had more hdmi inputs. It came with 2 which was fine at the time, but now I have 3 devices.
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What’s this threat with the TV being on the internet?
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I looked over the article and was hoping they might address this question: “why is a smart TV that never gets connected to the network or use any of the ‘smart’ features any more risky than a dumb TV?” If the answer is that it is not, then why limit yourself to the brand, specs, and size limitations of only dumb TV’s?
Oh, I can answer that.
Let’s say you have a Smart TV, but never let it connect to any network or use any smart feature. That’s usually not much of a problem, and a lot of people do it. I might end up having to do that some day because the available choices of dumb TVs are not great. But there are two problems I have noticed just with my brief few experiences with smart TVs in the wild.
One is that smart TVs are slow. Take a long time to turn on (boot), turn off, change settings, etc. A lot of them are running Android-based OSes on really really really slow CPUs. Dumb TVs these days are also pretty slow these days, but not as slow. Ideally I would like a display to respond to my inputs instantly. Change inputs/volume/channel as fast as I can press the button on the remote.
Second is that some smart TVs don’t let you avoid their smartness. Turn them on, and you are presented with smart TV bullshit immediately. No way to get around it unless they were nice enough to provide settings to disable it or you flash some custom software on there.
Really? I can’t say we have that problem with ours, but it’s also not exactly new anymore. Still pretty snappy. Takes about a second to come on and start showing something, faster than a CRT ever was.
The ones that my previous workplace put in the conference rooms would load the main screen like there was a playstation and a CD-ROM inside. That’s good if not all of them do that.
Yeah, they’re normally relatively speedy - it’s not instant, but I’d say more than three to five seconds would be genuinely unusual with the ones I’ve seen. There is some input lag from the remote, but it’s small.
Of course, grain of salt - It’s not like I’m regularly shopping for or looking at a wide range of TVs, or checking their start times. Some of them might take ages, some of them might be able to be ordered with custom firmware, maybe they’re running it off something different that delays startup, I dunno.
I work with a guy (sorta, it’s complicated) who works in business intelligence/marketing. He’s told me the way that even if you’re not using the smart features the smart features that the manufacturer wants to use are attempting to be used.
To hear him tell it, a bunch of the smart tv makers have basic deals with a lot of the ISPs out there that allow the smart tvs to use their networks with the ISP supplied routers a bunch of folks use. They then use those networks to send like, probably usage data and the like that the manufactures then sell.
If your nearest neighbor is out of wifi range it’s a non issue and if none of your neighbors are using an ISP that themanufacturer has such a deal with you’re also fine but I live in a city. I’ve got tens of neighbors in wifi range. Not a chance for me.
In some ways, this defeats the purpose of having a smart tv and not using the smart features.
I’m sure not every manufacturer does this but as far as I know, without insider info nonsense there’s no way to know which does and which doesn’t.
That seems slightly implausible. At the very least, if I accidentally hit the wrong button on the remote for a smart tv “feature”, it directs me to accepting the Terms, and it never goes past that if I don’t accept. Somewhere in the ToS it would hint at this—at least, one would hope after Vizio got caught spying directly and settled.
Well that restores my faith a bit. And fwiw, since I wanted OLED I had no choice but to get a smart tv and not enable any of the features. I don’t think I get directed to any TOS when I accidentally hit a smart tv feature (Implying I had to accept a TOS when I purchased and set up the TV). I think I get directed to a screen telling me I have to connect the TV somewhere. Which I never do.
I certainly hope that that means I’ve defeated the ever data hungry machine.