Author Topic: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them  (Read 21898 times)

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Online Gyro

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #25 on: February 02, 2022, 12:53:16 pm »
'Suspension of disbelief' if very hard to maintain for many technical folks watching movies. Surely the production teams are supposed to have a technical advisor on the payroll. Certainly old war movies always had a couple of retired army or navy types as advisors. Maybe their technical advisors studied arts subjects these days!  ::)
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Offline jonovid

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #26 on: February 02, 2022, 01:27:54 pm »
simple and cheap I have been buying dumb TV's for yrs.  4k is overrated IMO as most moves are in 2K or 1080p.
smart features like USB and 720p upscaling are standard nowadays so why pay more?
most dumb TV's screen size is about right for the room and have no internet hardware and or software to go out of date or stop working.
3D TV was a total failure as was most of the other expensive $ gimmicks.  ::)
my cheap dumb TV lives out its life as a video monitor for games & video playback. most family members are the same. :-+
Hobbyist with a basic knowledge of electronics
 

Online Ranayna

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #27 on: February 02, 2022, 01:41:51 pm »
Modern cheap TVs have one big, major issue: Advertising.
Why do you think they are cheap? Why is a simple display that does not even have any TV functionality, but uses the same panel, significantly more expensive?

Advertising and data collection.

I would willingly pay more for a TV that while still having at least limited smart functionality, does not show me any additional advertising (over what the TV stations are doing anyway).
I am soon in the market for something new, and still have no idea what to get.
I want something simple to use, that does not take ages to change channels, with an integrated DVB-S2 receiver, and limited "smarts" to access the internet offerings of the german public tv stations, that does not show any additional ads anywhere.

It's for my mum, and she likes it simple. Understandably so.
 

Online tom66

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #28 on: February 02, 2022, 03:09:33 pm »
I like good visual quality, so I own a Panasonic 42" plasma TV from 2012.

It has excellent image contrast, dynamic range and colour accuracy.  Films look pretty good on it.
 
It's not 4K, just full HD 1080p.  It has smart functions, I've used them once.  It has active-shutter 3D, I've used that maybe twice.  It's just a big, nice display monitor right now.

It cost me £120 second-hand,  so probably worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace it is an OLED.
 
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Offline themadhippy

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #29 on: February 02, 2022, 03:14:56 pm »
Quote
TVs used to just have 4 buttons on the tuner: BBC1, 2, ITV, Ch4
only since 1982,you youngster wont remember the days when the 4'th button was either the betamax video recorder or itv from another region,of course if your even older  all you had was bbc (1) or itv
 

Offline HighVoltage

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #30 on: February 02, 2022, 03:15:17 pm »
I have stopped watching TV many years ago! We don't even have a TV set anymore.

There are 3 kinds of people in this world, those who can count and those who can not.
 
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Offline pardo-bsso

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #31 on: February 02, 2022, 03:28:09 pm »
About the BBC and its defunding.

Being in South America, I used to listen to it over shortwave for quite some time before the modern interference in my town made that impossible (and internet arrived).

I'd gladly pay them to be able to watch their content but alas, the contortions needed to do so are a chore.
 

Offline bingo600

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #32 on: February 02, 2022, 03:59:16 pm »
My new 55" SmartTv LG was connected to the internet (via PDS cable) once, when new to get a firmware update.
And i actually connected it via a VPN connection. I know that VPN worked , because it belived it was in that country's  TZ after the update.

Since then no internet for the TV ...

So it's not a Smart-TV , but a "Dumb-TV"  :-DD

All watching is done via an AppleTV , that is "locked a bit down" via a pi-hole.

/Bingo
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #33 on: February 02, 2022, 04:28:11 pm »
Quote
Since the new tool is no more capable of moving earth than the bargain he got for 1/10th of the cost at auction, set his hand to and repaired for a fraction of the price

That's unsustainable. If everyone did that there would be no new ones to be worn out and auctioned off, so any that were available would cost pretty much the same as a new one anyway. But there might not be any new ones any more since the manufacturers can't live on second-hand auction sales, so your mate could well end up paying more than the new price for a turd.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #34 on: February 02, 2022, 04:57:44 pm »
A TV isn’t an investment, it’s an expense. And they’re cheaper than ever.

There’s tons of trash on TV, but at the same time we’re in a golden age of TV, where even the networks are making some outstanding programs (the fact that there’s tons of crap as well doesn’t make their great work any less great), but above all, Netflix is bringing everyone the best of TV from around the world. 20 years ago, we watched what came on TV when it came on (occasionally using a VCR to time shift it) and that was that. Now we can be very selective, and watch what we want, when we want it.

Additionally, YouTube has enabled the creation of high quality video content that networks would never have given the green light. Channels like eevblog, Ask a Mortician, and the gazillions of really excellent cooking channels (like Maangchi, Cooking with Dog, or Pasta Grammar) could never exist on network TV, at least not in the way they do. (For example, how episodes can be as long as they need to be, not crammed or stretched into half hour slots.)

Meanwhile the Hollywood movie studios appear to have been castrated at some point, in that they no longer have the balls to make anything except for Yet Another Stupid Movie based on Marvel or DC Comics superheroes.

Me, I haven’t actually had cable (or satellite or aerial) connected to my TV since 2008. I’ve used streaming and downloads exclusively since then.
 
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Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #35 on: February 02, 2022, 06:37:46 pm »
News coverage is horribly biased. They way they've dealt with COVID-19 and the government's response just proves this. They've failed to adequately challenge the government's policies: lockdown, school closures, mask mandates etc. Perhaps they were right and necessary, maybe the BBC agreed with them, or perhaps they were an over-reaction, with greater harms, than benefits, but that's not the point. It was their duty as a public broadcaster to question policies which placed the greatest restrictions on our freedoms, during peacetime.
That's not entirely true. While the BBC's actual news program coverage of COVID has been really bad, I've listened to several genuine analyses on Radio 4. Things where they have broken down government announcements, shown how deceptive they are, and basically called out the lying scumbags.
 

Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #36 on: February 02, 2022, 06:57:57 pm »
Firstly, to quote your own comment back at you...

.... The BBC used to be excellent, but we never watch it any more.....

If you never watch the BBC, then it seems that you are hardly qualified to be able to give an informed opinion on its output. Most of the output you do watch seems to be 10 years old and on other networks.
I only stopped paying the licence fee last summer, when I realised we hadn't watched anything on the BBC for the 3 month since my wife went to care for mother outside the UK. She was still watching a few things on the BBC until she left, and I saw the poor quality. I especially saw the very poor state of BBC news coverage. Currently she's not living in the UK right now, so I had no reason to renew our licence.

Quote
It used to be that all the channels offered pretty good documentaries. ITV has never been quite as down market as most people remember. They are all pretty bad now.

You illustrate my point perfectly, The output of ITV and most other channels are governed by their investors and advertisers. They go for the lowest common denominator - soaps, game shows, 'reality TV' etc. The lowest effort and expenditure for the maximum financial return. The result - low end crap. A possible exception is the Channel 4 / Film4  etc umbrella, who do finance film projects, though not as much as they used to (they are relying on imported US shows and 'reality TV' more and more though). The BBC has none of these restrictions (other than the amount of money available from the license fee).
How does what I said illustrate your point? ITV revenue has always been driven by pulling the maximum audience it can, and used to find the best approach was to produce a diverse range of high quality material. More BBC1 thanBBC2, but not garbage. Once audiences become split across a wide range of options its very hard for any of them to gather enough funds to produce high quality output. This has happened over and over across the world, especially since satellite channels exploded the number of broadcast channels possible. As you say, the BBC has not been starved of resources to the extent of others. It just didn't have to try very hard against cash strapped competitors, and gave up caring.
 

Online rstofer

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #37 on: February 02, 2022, 06:58:20 pm »
As I understand it there are two issues for BBC:  Mandatory subscription if you own a television, whether you watch the channels or not, and the fact that BBC took sides over BREXIT.  They absolutely should lose their protected 'public' status. And paying for a service you don't want seems problematic. 

In the US, we have PBS, a poorly subscribed Public Broadcasting System.  It is funded by donations and attempts to avoid taking sides:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

PBS creates some very interesting content but I haven't watched it in decades.  I'm not sure why...  Maybe because I don't watch any news or documentary channels.

 

Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #38 on: February 02, 2022, 07:04:00 pm »
As I understand it there are two issues for BBC:  Mandatory subscription if you own a television, whether you watch the channels or not, and the fact that BBC took sides over BREXIT.  They absolutely should lose their protected 'public' status. And paying for a service you don't want seems problematic. 

In the US, we have PBS, a poorly subscribed Public Broadcasting System.  It is funded by donations and attempts to avoid taking sides:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

PBS creates some very interesting content but I haven't watched it in decades.  I'm not sure why...  Maybe because I don't watch any news or documentary channels.
There was a time when some of the US PBS stations, like WGBH in Boston, produced a lot of great science and natural history series with the BBC. They were mostly edited and redubbed for the local audiences, because it seems Americans can't understand English, but 95% of the program's contents were the same.
 

Offline cdev

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #39 on: February 02, 2022, 08:36:52 pm »
A huge monitor OTOH is a very useful thing to have and a good investment, if its also cheap.

I'm much more productive with a big monitor because I am kind of disorganized and like to have things out and visible.

I think research on productivity and multitasking has been fairly conclusive as to the usefulness of multiple monitors and big monitors. Then, you can also use it for watching videos (what I think of when people say "watching TV") Its been several years since I actually watched TV from the cable. (Although I do sometimes watch OTA TV from New York City, which I get here, fairly well now, for free) But I find that most over the air TV programming is fairly lame. (with the exception of some comedy shows that I like a lot)
"What the large print giveth, the small print taketh away."
 

Offline AndyC_772

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #40 on: February 02, 2022, 09:03:47 pm »
I like good visual quality, so I own a Panasonic 42" plasma TV from 2012.

It has excellent image contrast, dynamic range and colour accuracy.  Films look pretty good on it.
 
It's not 4K, just full HD 1080p.  It has smart functions, I've used them once.  It has active-shutter 3D, I've used that maybe twice.  It's just a big, nice display monitor right now.

It cost me £120 second-hand,  so probably worthwhile.

The only thing that could replace it is an OLED.

Sounds very like the 50" Panasonic that I finally upgraded in late 2020. I'd had it professionally calibrated and it was excellent.

I replaced it with an LG OLED, which took quite a lot of adjusting to make it match the plasma in terms of brightness, contrast and colour accuracy - but it was well worth it.

Side by side, showing the same content, the plasma suddenly looked noisy and flickery. The OLED image is much cleaner.

The really big difference, though, is HDR. You really need to see it to understand why; it's not about having a brighter image overall, but about having an image in which specular highlights and other light sources actually look like lights, and aren't just white. I didn't realise that I'd never seen a display anything like it before; it really did show me something genuinely new, and it's not something I was expecting.

Oh, yeah, it's 4K too, but I struggle to tell the difference from 1080p on a 55" screen at a normal viewing distance. For movies I have a true 4K projector, and at that size, the extra resolution is both noticeable and worthwhile. Projected 3D with active shutter glasses is brilliant too, *much* more watchable than 3D TV.

Offline LaserSteve

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #41 on: February 02, 2022, 09:54:33 pm »
Be careful what you wish for.   BBC shows on PBS and now on some commercial networks blow most American TV shows out of the water.  At least your lot can come up with complete paragraphs, and treat the viewer as if they are not sixth graders, which is year 7 in most of the UK school systems.

I live for Mystery!, Downton Abbey, Inspector Morse, etc.   The Science and History shows can be first rate from BBC and ITV.  Dame Lucy may be crazy, but she can tell an intelligent tale.

Our TV is more concerned about the Kardashians, what ever the heck that is.  Our best PBS informational  show, Frontline, is placed on very late at night  to avoid offending basically Anyone.  We used to have Nova! for Science, but that was watered down when the producer retired.

I don't speak Russian, but I have started watching their Science shows on Youtube.  Imagery and Locations are first rate.

We had a channel for a while that ran European detective shows, which were awesome. Even if all I had were subtitles.

If you live in the States, you have to pay a fortune for streaming services, and 90% of that is still crap.

Steve   

 

« Last Edit: February 02, 2022, 10:05:41 pm by LaserSteve »
"When in doubt, check the Byte order of the Communications Protocol, By Hand, On an Oscilloscope"

Quote from a co-inventor of the PLC, whom i had the honor of working with recently.
 
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Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #42 on: February 02, 2022, 10:04:31 pm »
I replaced it with an LG OLED, which took quite a lot of adjusting to make it match the plasma in terms of brightness, contrast and colour accuracy - but it was well worth it.
When did you get your OLED screen? Up to 2016 they looked great in a darkened room, but couldn't achieve the brightness for a normal room without looking like cartoons. There was a substantial improvement in 2016/2017 and after that they got the brightness to pretty reasonable levels with nuance. They still seem to struggle to get good contrast in a bright room. Obviously in a darkened room the contrast of an OLED is very impressive, but they have generally reflected too much of the room's light to give high contrast in a lit room. This seems to be improving, too.
 

Online tom66

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #43 on: February 02, 2022, 10:53:17 pm »
Sounds very like the 50" Panasonic that I finally upgraded in late 2020. I'd had it professionally calibrated and it was excellent.

I replaced it with an LG OLED, which took quite a lot of adjusting to make it match the plasma in terms of brightness, contrast and colour accuracy - but it was well worth it.

Side by side, showing the same content, the plasma suddenly looked noisy and flickery. The OLED image is much cleaner.

The really big difference, though, is HDR. You really need to see it to understand why; it's not about having a brighter image overall, but about having an image in which specular highlights and other light sources actually look like lights, and aren't just white. I didn't realise that I'd never seen a display anything like it before; it really did show me something genuinely new, and it's not something I was expecting.

Oh, yeah, it's 4K too, but I struggle to tell the difference from 1080p on a 55" screen at a normal viewing distance. For movies I have a true 4K projector, and at that size, the extra resolution is both noticeable and worthwhile. Projected 3D with active shutter glasses is brilliant too, *much* more watchable than 3D TV.

Yes, HDR is something I'm keen to get into,  I've always been a little bit of an avgeek.

For many years I had a 9th Gen Pioneer Kuro plasma, a fantastic TV, I eventually sold it as I got tired of the "dirty screen effect" and panel buzzing (unfortunately many Kuros suffer from this, and it gets worse over time.)  I was able to adjust the settings in the service menu to the point that the image contrast was extremely good, I did get a tiny bit of maldischarge if pixels hadn't been used for 30 seconds or so, which showed I was really pushing the panel to its limit, but it looked superb.  A great example is 'Gravity', where you get shots of the Shuttle against a pitch-black background.   You just need to see it to experience it.  By the way, if there are people on here that enjoy calibrating test equipment and so on, I dare you to dive into tweaking a Kuro PDP, as it has about 20 different parameters adjustable from the service menu, from power supply voltages to rise and fall rates to oscillation periods and panel resonance tuning.   Truly a work of (engineering) art.

I bought it second-hand as well, though with a fault and fixed it (common for a regulator on the digital board to go bad.)  I think it cost about £300 at the time, when working examples were still selling for about £2k.  But, I kept it regardless.

Ironically, I bought the Panasonic fully working (I don't know how I got an ST50 for so little, it was the 2nd-from-the-top Panasonic at the time, but maybe "plasma" was becoming a dirty word.)  It was one of the few TVs I ever actually purchased in working order, and it died about 18 months later.  A small optocoupler on the sustain board had gone open circuit, causing the controller to think the HV was missing on the floating voltage side.  Took about an hour to find and a scrap optocoupler from a Samsung plasma board sorted it out fine.  Been fine for 4 years since.

I've been considering a late-generation OLED panel, and I thought I might as well go big or go home, so will get a 65" one.  4K still probably won't matter for that, but I suppose it'll make things look a tad better.  Thing is, the Panasonic hasn't died,  and it's got 20,000 hours on the panel now, with no perceptible burn in, so I'm in no rush.
« Last Edit: February 02, 2022, 10:57:22 pm by tom66 »
 
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Online Ground_Loop

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #44 on: February 03, 2022, 12:33:50 am »
"An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them"

1) It's not an investment.  Neither is the opera, pizza, or Super Bowl.
2) Is there some beginner-level technical matter for this thread?

You beat me to it. People need to understand the difference between investments and expenses.
There's no point getting old if you don't have stories.
 
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Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #45 on: February 03, 2022, 12:36:39 am »
I live for Mystery!, Downton Abbey, Inspector Morse, etc.
John Thaw died 20 years ago. This might limit his further output of episodes of Morse.
 

Offline LaserSteve

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #46 on: February 03, 2022, 12:44:07 am »
His sidekick does well enough after "promotion".  RIP Mr. Thaw
Steve
"When in doubt, check the Byte order of the Communications Protocol, By Hand, On an Oscilloscope"

Quote from a co-inventor of the PLC, whom i had the honor of working with recently.
 

Offline Ed.Kloonk

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #47 on: February 03, 2022, 12:49:33 am »
I live for Mystery!, Downton Abbey, Inspector Morse, etc.
John Thaw died 20 years ago. This might limit his further output of episodes of Morse.

George Lucas has gotten very good at, um, reanimating old English actors.
iratus parum formica
 

Online coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #48 on: February 03, 2022, 12:51:10 am »
His sidekick does well enough after "promotion".  RIP Mr. Thaw
Steve
It was one of the best series made for UK TV, and was made by ITV. Good television in the UK was never exclusively a BBC thing, and both BBC1 and ITV has always had more garbage (especially for Saturday night) than they should. The endless garbage now just comes down to diluted audiences starving the makers of resources. <10M viewers for a program for a broad audience used to mean a failure. Now 10M means a raging success.
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #49 on: February 03, 2022, 01:05:24 am »
[...]  if there are people on here that enjoy calibrating test equipment and so on, I dare you to dive into tweaking a Kuro PDP, as it has about 20 different parameters adjustable [...]

You haven't lived until you've tried adjusting the colour convergence on an old school tube colour TV!  :D

 
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