Another what to look for in a TV thread

mbalbritton

mbalbritton

#@$%!
Joined
Mar 22, 2005
Location
Lakeland, FL
so after 10 years of reliable service our 46” Philips LCD is starting to wear out. You turn it on and it’s starts to power up then shuts off. Then you have to stand at the TV and push the button on the TV several times until it “warms up” enough to stay on. From searching it sounds like it can be fixed fairly easy, but with the cutting of the cable cord I’m thinking of replaceing the TV with something more modern that has or we can put Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and the sort on. Hopefully built in and not needing another external device. Not to mention the Wii is dying too and that’s what we use for Hulu and Netflix.

So with all that long winded babbling, what should I look for in a new TV? I haven’t paid much attention to the changes in the past 20 years.

I’m looking to stay in the 46” range and try to keep it to about $600-$800 but I’m not going over that. TV isn’t that important to me.
 
Probably bad caps on it, they are pretty easy to fix. I bought a new 4k tv and put my old one in the garage after fixing the caps.

I keep an eye on slickdeals.com to find good deals and then jump once I find really good sales. A ton of the TV's now have built in smart apps like you are talking about. 600-800 will get you a very nice 46.
 
I deal with TVs almost every day working at AT&T. I see all kinds from the no name POS to the major brand POS that the people think is the shit. I see problems all the time with the smart TVs wireless cards and flakey firmware updates causing issues. If I was buying a new TV I would stay clear of the smart TVs and just get a 4k tv and a stand alone streaming device of your choice. On average from what I’ve seen is a smart TV normally cost $150-200 more than a dumb TV.
 
mbalbritton said:
Good info. If I have to periodically update my TV firmware, that will annoy the piss out of me. Good point.
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I’ve got a smart tv and it’s like whenever I open an app it has to update and it’s like damn it so it makes me not want to use them. I bought a firestick that I side loaded some apps to it and I use that more than anything.
 
Not gonna pretend to be tech savvy, but I was looking for a 40-50” tv for a spare room a couple months back in the same price range. Had a specific resolution and refresh rate I was looking for. Pretty sure damn near everything is 1080p and 120hz, which is what I wanted. I didn’t really care about anything else besides the price...which seemed to be dictated more by the gadgets I didn’t care about. So from there I hopped on Best Buy and filtered what I was looking for, and price range, and a couple of my preferred brands. Ended up finding several of ‘last years models’ and most of those were in the 60” range. So that’s what I went with. As it turned out, it is a Smart Tv...but I couldn’t even tell you how to utilize whatever is smart about it.

750525D4-8804-4F5D-8602-7C9B1A0B2B53.jpeg
 
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mbalbritton said:
Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime and the sort on. Hopefully built in and not needing another external device. Not to mention the Wii is dying too and that’s what we use for Hulu and Netflix.
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It sounds like you don't care about picture quality or the capabilities of the device, so just buy whatever is cheap and looks all right to you, then pick up a roku stick.

We have a couple of fire sticks, but Amazon has shot themselves in the foot with this Google war... Not to mention that both of our fire sticks have taken to turning on the TV by themselves at random times, or switching inputs to the fire stick when we're watching something else.
 
Also, if your WiFi connection is at all spotty and you can get an Ethernet cable to the TV, spend the extra on the hard wired roku devices. Streaming a TV show will saturate the 2.4GHz wireless band.
 
shawn said:
It sounds like you don't care about picture quality or the capabilities of the device, so just buy whatever is cheap and looks all right to you, then pick up a roku stick.
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This bring up a good point I was wondering. I attributed the poor picture quality of Netflix and Hulu to my old ass Wii. Does the device not make a difference? Or is this a broadcasting resolution issue?
 
mbalbritton said:
This bring up a good point I was wondering. I attributed the poor picture quality of Netflix and Hulu to my old ass Wii. Does the device not make a difference? Or is this a broadcasting resolution issue?
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The Wii is not capable of high definition. It maxed out at 480. So yeah, switching to a modern device and connecting it with HDMI should automatically get you a better picture.
 
Minor thread derailment...but on the topic of picture quality. I’m sitting here watching the Army/Navy game...in absolute awe that I can make out individual snowflakes. 10 years ago (maybe 15 now)...I feel like I was happy if I could just make out that there were 11 blobs of color on the screen for the team I was rooting for.
 
shawn said:
Also, if your WiFi connection is at all spotty and you can get an Ethernet cable to the TV, spend the extra on the hard wired roku devices. Streaming a TV show will saturate the 2.4GHz wireless band.
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How do you figure? Unless you're streaming in 4k then you shouldn't be using more than about 25% bandwidth of even a single-stream connected 2.4GHz router (30-40 Mbps).
 
Fabrik8 said:
How do you figure? Unless you're streaming in 4k then you shouldn't be using more than about 25% bandwidth of even a single-stream connected 2.4GHz router (30-40 Mbps).
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Check your actual bandwidth on any 2.4GHz network. If you're 10-20ft away from the router with a clear line of sight to the antenna, you can probably get 90-100Mpbs. If you're 15ft away, but with a wall in the way, that number (in my house) drops to 40-50Mbps. At 30ft and two rooms away, the max speed drops to 20-30Mbps.

Now, that's with 3x 9dbi antennas on the router. If yours still has the little stock antenna, your numbers might be even worse.

5GHz has a lot more bandwidth (especially if you're able to take advantage of multiple streams), but doesn't go through obstructions as well, so falls off a lot faster.
 
shawn said:
Check your actual bandwidth on any 2.4GHz network. If you're 10-20ft away from the router with a clear line of sight to the antenna, you can probably get 90-100Mpbs. If you're 15ft away, but with a wall in the way, that number (in my house) drops to 40-50Mbps. At 30ft and two rooms away, the max speed drops to 20-30Mbps.

Now, that's with 3x 9dbi antennas on the router. If yours still has the little stock antenna, your numbers might be even worse.

5GHz has a lot more bandwidth (especially if you're able to take advantage of multiple streams), but doesn't go through obstructions as well, so falls off a lot faster.
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Correct statement Sir.
 
Fabrik8 said:
...but at 6-8 Mbps for regular HD streaming, where's the max bandwidth problem...?
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I was just sitting here thinking how we rarely had issues with 5MB/s DSL and no issues with 20MB/S Uverse.
 
FWIW we have Visio smart tv and we use Netflix Hulu and amazon regularly with no issues connected via Ethernet cable to the modem/router.

It was a cheaper sale model this time last year and it seems to be way better than the roku via WiFi 5’ from the modem/router
 
We have two Samsung Smart TV's that we bought from Sam's Club. Both are about 3-4 yrs old. They work great and we have not had any trouble from either of them. We are thinking about buying a third one now for the play room/gym room.
 
Everyone else has pretty much hit on the main points. I use Samsung for work a whole lot and have been very happy with their picture quality and user interfaces. Plus they don't seem to be as temperamental with formatting on USB drives etc which is how we play most content. Non issue for a homeowner though.

I do agree on the point of buying a dumb tv and an external streaming device.

Find the tv you want and cross search the model number on a few sites. Amazon usually has the best deals, except this time of year can be a crap shoot with all of the Christmas sales.
 
Fabrik8 said:
...but at 6-8 Mbps for regular HD streaming, where's the max bandwidth problem...?
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Interesting question. You're talking theoretical idealized bandwidth. The more WiFi traffic there is, the slower everything gets. You're dealing with radio, so you have to account for errors and resends, and that gets worse with cross traffic. If the device is sitting next to the router, no worries. But if it's a couple rooms away, your neighbor across the street uses the same frequency, and you want to browse NC4x4 while they're watching Umizumi, your shit is going to be slow.

For reference, here is The Grand Tour in HD (left) vs in UHD (right). Measured at the gateway, because the gateway router's WiFi isn't used by the devices in the living room, and 4k is wired only.

Screenshot_20171210-084219.png


In HD, it was averaging 13 Mbps. UHD is a shit ton higher than that. I didn't let it run long enough to get a good average, but check out the bandwidth required for caching!

jeepinmatt said:
5MB/s DSL and no issues with 20MB/S Uverse.
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I'm talking about WiFi bandwidth, which is a different animal than wired bandwidth to your provider. I'm also measuring in bits, not bytes.

Also, Vizio's tvs are no longer televisions, they're monitors only. They took out the tuners a year or two ago, so they're useless if you want to watch OTA television.

I'm not a fan of Samsung. Their picture quality has never been great, but the OP doesn't sound like he cares about any of that.
 
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shawn said:
Interesting question. You're talking theoretical idealized bandwidth. The more WiFi traffic there is, the slower everything gets. You're dealing with radio, so you have to account for errors and resends, and that gets worse with cross traffic. If the device is sitting next to the router, no worries. But if it's a couple rooms away, your neighbor across the street uses the same frequency, and you want to browse NC4x4 while they're watching Umizumi, your shit is going to be slow.

For reference, here is The Grand Tour in HD (left) vs in UHD (right). Measured at the gateway, because the gateway router's WiFi isn't used by the devices in the living room, and 4k is wired only.

View attachment 259176

In HD, it was averaging 13 Mbps. UHD is a shit ton higher than that. I didn't let it run long enough to get a good average, but check out the bandwidth required for caching!
Click to expand...


Actual data... it brings a tear to my eye. :beer:

Idealized aside, we haven't had any problems in a long time because we're in a low-density neighborhood with a non-shared 2.4GHz channel for our TV devices, and our phones/Chromebooks/laptops are split out to the 5GHz connection. Plus we have no kids so the number of bandwidth consuming devices is fairly small at any given time.
 
Not to derail the thread as well, but I’ve heard a lot of off brand and cheaper TV’s have high end guts and components. Supposedly vizio has Sony guts. Just wondering if you can get the picture and size without the cost.
 
Keep in mind too that when you go look at them in a store, the lighting is different and you are usually a lot closer to the tv than when you are sitting on your couch.

Nothing else to add since I don’t really care as much about the picture quality as much as the longevity. The Vizio in my living room was bought around 2010 and my wife is a stay at home mom. So it is usually on all day, every day.
 
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