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Sony launches new version of the best cheap 4K Blu-ray player that drops the streaming tech – but the price looks odd (www.techradar.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/homevideo@feddit.uk
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[–] 31 points 2 years ago (16 children)

I hope we're not paying more for a player that does less…

You are and will be, as the cost of hardware in "smart" devices (and the reason that non-smart TV's no longer exist) are subsidized with on-device advertising and massive data collection/reselling.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (15 children)

    Yeah. Part of me wonders how much of a premium that making a TV dumb would be and if there is a large enough market that would buy into it.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    They already exist. You just have to look for "signage displays" or "commercial TV's", they come with all the smart crap stripped out.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Iiyama screens are some of the best commercial screens. Unfortunately commercial screens usually lack the plug in and play features on domestic tellys, which can be a right faff

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Plug and play features like....

    Plug an HDMI cable in and watch?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Why not purchase one subsidized by ads then just not connect it to the internet? Seems like a win-win

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    ...because there's no guarantee it will work without internet.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Can you provide an example of one that only works online? I have never heard of that.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (3 children)

    I'm not sure we're there yet, but we're certainly in the "nag banners on a frequent basis" realm on TVs. Not technically unusable, but practically unusable.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Fair, but I don’t think we should want to pay a premium for a dumb TV in fear of a hypothetical future. Perhaps worthwhile if it ever happens, but until then buying a subsidized smart TV and keeping it dumb seems fully better to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Disagree. You have to vote with your wallet. It's not like the manufactures aren't going to continue down the road they're on. The only thing that will stop them is losing sales because of this crap.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    You’d pay more money for a something you can do free right now, just in case a hypothetical product in the future does that?

    Just thinking, I bet capitalism is ready and willing to provide if there are a lot of likeminded. I expect the current TV manufacturers would make smart TVs internet-only if a dumb TV company succeeded, then undercut that company with slightly cheaper dumb TVs of their own, Amazon style. That’s a win-win for them: they get to charge more for what we have for free currently, and demand more advertisement money since the audience of the cheaper smart TV is now captive. Their profit margin would still be higher than the dumb TV company because they’re already making them, too.

    I don’t see a version of events where existing manufacturers lose if this happens. This feels like a road to hell paved with good intentions.

    Edit: to be clear I’m very much on your side with “fuck the tv makers and fuck advertising as a whole”. I just truly fail to see how this could be anything but free market research for the existing manufacturers and an acceleration of the enshittification (hey, an accurate use!). I’m quite open to alternative theories.

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    • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    My number 1 requirement is being able to disable HDR, my sets don't implement it correctly and HDR content is unwatchable because of it.

    The only fix is to disable it on the device as the sets don't have that option.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Now I'm genuinely curious: what if you get a super-old and cheap HDMI cable? I'm talking like HDMI 1.2 or 1.4. What are the chances that your tv will be able to process whatever resolution video but not receive enough information to interpret HDR?

    Or, it'll likely be more like running gigabit from a cheap router over Cat3 or paired Cat1 where the high frequency generates so much noise on the low-quality unshielded twists of cable that it struggles to assign any standards and you end up with nothing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    The cable would still need to do 4K though...

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    I think 1.4 does 4K @30Hz. Anyway, I could have sworn most TVs have the ability to turn off HDR, or at least have picture modes incompatible with HDR. Loophole, baby!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Yeah, Samsung not so much. The non-HDR picture is vibrant and gorgeous. The HDR is dark, muddy, and unwatchable.

    Fortunately all the devices I have feeding them have the option to disable it.

    Example:

    HDR On:

    HDR Off:

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    My LG TV was similar and I had to go digging in the settings to mess with brightness, backlight and black detail. Anything that was dark on HDR was just black and I had to go in and up the black detail and brightness/contrast settings

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    • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Does it play CD's too? I'm in the market for a new player.

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