EntropySink
Nothing & Everything => Open Discussion => Topic started by: ober on February 15, 2018, 08:30:25 AM
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I had gotten a 'retention bonus' from my previous company which was a thousand shares that I had to hold for a bit so they'd vest and I also had to be at the company until they vested. I did all that and they were finally released to me late last year and I was finally able to sell them for a decent little profit. Not groundbreaking, but it sort of made up for all the raises and christmas bonuses I didn't get while I was at that company.
Anyways, that's not the point of the thread. My wife and I decided to get a bigger tv with some of the money. Our current tv is a 42" that's almost 9 years old. It's still great and looks good but I wanted to go a little bigger and get something a little more modern. So I did some research. We really like the Roku platform and last year we bought a small 32" TCL brand tv for our bedroom. It's ok and the picture quality is pretty good but we love the fact that the Roku is built into the TV and with our current setup using Spectrum's streaming app for live tv and then Netflix/Amazon/whatever... it's really kind of perfect.
So I started looking at bigger tvs assuming that the larger TCL tvs would be nice but not look as great as some of the other sets on the market. But after looking for a long time, I narrowed it down to a Samsung and a TCL model. The TCL model had a lot of reviews that kept saying how all these people did tons of research and kept coming back to it. So in the end, I was convinced. TCL 55" 4K UHD tv is what we got and it arrived last night. I set it up and it's fucking beautiful :) It's so nice to be back to a single remote for everything and the picture quality is amazing. I've never had a tv before that when it 'cut to black' that the tv basically disappeared. It literally looks like the tv turns off when it goes to commercial and the screen is black for a second. And the colors/picture are amazing. And Jesus the roku interface is just awesome. It reminds me of the Tivo interface in a lot of ways in terms of the ease of use.
Anyways, just thought I'd throw out a recommendation.
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Nice. Prices are through the floor these days. Anyone notice years and years later still remarkably little 4K content?
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Yeah, I listened to a podcast about that recently and I just think there hasn't been enough people that have upgraded to 4K sets to make it worthwhile. And streaming 4K content, which is how I think most people watch anything now, is difficult due to size and bandwidth limitations. It's not really all that surprising if you think about it but I do think it will happen.
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do the 4k tv's do upconverstion? and if so, perhaps that's part of why content creators don't bother with the added cost on their end?
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According to some reviews, yes. https://www.tomsguide.com/us/time-to-buy-4k-tvs,news-17388.html
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There's no web browser on this is there?
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Personally I think the need for the smart part of the TV is overblown. TV companies still have not learned to do the smart part well. This is compared to the external devices that do it well, are relatively inexpensive, and can be upgraded over the life of the TV. We use a Roku and there are plenty of other similar units. Get a TV for video and leave the audio and smarts to those who do it well.
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@charlie - not to my knowledge. I've never used or wanted to use a browser on my tv. There might be a browser app but I've never bothered to look. I'm with Knuck in that regard.
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Specifically my wife is looking for a TV that has a browser that can be used to display a page from the school site as a bulletin board of sorts. From my brief investigation only Samsung TVs have this available, but I haven't looked that hard. She found a TCL and asked about it the same day you posted this so I was curious.
I'm not convinced that displaying a webpage is the best way to have a bulletin board type thing on a screen at the school, but for now it's our best idea.
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Charlie, we use Raspberry PIs to power our displays. They are easy to hide behind the TV itself. Using a webpage isn't a bad way, especially if you are in kiosk mode and it doesn't show the browser frame.
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Yeah... if I had time an energy I do like that as an option. I'm not familiar with how common a "kiosk mode" is on any of these TVs, or if we specifically need a web browser. The benefit of serving it from a webpage is that it is easier for folks to update remotely (versus the original idea, which was to put images on a USB stick and have them loop like a screensaver).
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FullPageOS is an OS for the raspberry pi that is designed to open in kiosk mode. From there you can have it launch the browser to a particular page. Probably cheaper to do that than find a TV with built in browser.
For clarification: The kiosk mode is on the raspberry pi, not on the TV.
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also cheap, an much easier from a technical standpoint would be to throw a chromecast dongle on there and cast from chrome browser on any networked device.
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This is a Roku link, but it gives you a basis for what options to compare to. Google, Apple, Roku, home brew, or others. Best to balance capabilities, price, and user friendliness I think. Not sure which option is the most capable these days and haven't researched prices lately. The Roku is as user friendly as a device can be. When we have visitors they have all had it down in a few seconds. I have heard good things about a few others. It may come down to what is your digital ecosystem. All Apple household? AppleTV. Crazy about Amazon... you get the picture.
This might help in that they keep fairly current product reviews.
https://www.theverge.com/tv-box-review
https://image.roku.com/ww/docs/compare-chart-products-en-us.pdf
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Found this today on the WOOT daily deal.
https://www.woot.com/category/electronics?ref=w_gh_el_4
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Nice :) Since both of our main TVs are Roku TVs, I now have a Roku 3 and a Roku stick that I'm not sure I'll have a use for. I'll probably put the Roku 3 downstairs when we set that TV up, but I'm not sure what to do with the Roku stick.