OK, maybe I get it now. Smart TVs and boxes both have their place.

by ifixpedals

I'm late to this party, but I have a confession: I was sort of wrong about smart TVs.

I've been ranting against smart TVs for years, insisting that displays should not be "smart" at all. All the while I never actually owned one, but I knew some day I would be forced to as fewer and fewer "dumb" TV's remained on the market. For me, a TV was nothing more than a very large computer monitor for all your attached devices and doo-dads, which get replaced as they go obsolete, while a good TV should last me 7-10 years. A smart TV was, in my mind, a scam toward planned obsolescence, only this time you are replacing a $500-$1000 investment every couple years rather than $50-$200. Of course, you may HAVE to buy a smart TV, but you shouldn't buy it FOR the smart features.

So last weekend I followed my own buying advice and bought a Sony Bravia x800g solely for its fantastic HDR, its reviews and its holiday price. When I got it home, I hooked up my Nvidia Shield right away because Lord knows I'm not going to use whatever crap software was inside this TV. But then I hit "power" and - what's this? An Android boot animation?

(I'm sure it's common knowledge in this sub that Sony Bravias run Android TV, but what can I say? I was a set top box snob and didn't care about smart TVs.)

To my surprise, it's not so bad. Of course, it's nowhere NEAR as snappy as my 2015 Shield, but it's alright considering I would have bought it for the price I paid without any smart tech whatsoever. Android TV was like a freebie, so I can't complain. Sony loaded the app drawer with bloatware, of course, but I've removed them from the home screen so I don't think of them much.

One big surprise is that this TV actually does some things BETTER. Particularly, turning on or waking the TV with the remote or with Google Home is much faster than my Shield, mainly because the latter had to do so by communicating with my Receiver and TV through HDMI-CEC. The Shield talking to my old Onkyo receiver sometimes took as long as a minute.

Also, the Bravia seems to handle my old legacy HDHomeRun tuner's MPEG2 streams over WiFi without a glitch. I have no idea why. My Shield had to receive MPEG2 over a hardwired Ethernet connection. My only theory is that Sony focused a lot on limiting packet loss over WiFi to make it work flawlessly with external tuners, but I can only guess.

The Shield is now moved to the bedroom, still serving as my Plex library server while retiring my old Nexus Player that served me well for many years. I'm sure that once my Bravia stops receiving security updates I can just turn off its WiFi and hook up the latest Shield.

So I guess the moral is that every piece of tech has it's place for someone. I wont give up on the trusty external Android TV boxes, but "smart" TVs aren't nearly as "dumb" (lame pun intended) as I thought. For now, this set up works.

JimJam427

The only shitty part about most smart TVs is that they have a 10/100mb nic. If you're far away from a router with poor wifi performance but have a Ethernet drop you're limited. My Sony Bravia could not run any 4k hdr on the Sony nic/wifi so I got a shield.

NedSc

The newer Sony TVs are pretty great. The older Sony Android TVs were another story... Those older ones were dog slow. Thankfully Sony saw the light and put in a decent SOC into the newer models.

TSwizzlesNipples

I've been ranting against smart TVs for years, insisting that displays should not be "smart" at all.

This sentiment is 100% correct. Technology outpaces displays by leaps and bounds. Monitors should be "dumb terminals" meant to connect to less expensive to replace STBs. I'd gladly pay for top-of-the-line display technology that I don't have to replace in 5 years paired with a cheap STB that I can replace once a year.

I've had $5000 worth of TVs over the years completely fucked by Samsung and their Tizen bullshit. And that's only 2 TVs btw.

BurtMacklin-FBl

Been saying this for a long time. Built in OS definitely has its advantages. It is more convenient and you get the benefit of keeping your TVs upscaling which is usually far superior. I always had issues with color space and frame rate switching on my boxes but on a built in OS it just works. Most of the time updates are only a problem if you MUST have latest software. I even blocked updates on my Sony because everything was working fine.

"Just buy a dumb TV" is bad advice because there are basically no TVs worth getting that have no smart features anymore. It's not like the OS itself is what makes the TV more expensive AND you can always buy a box later if you want.

Ekos640

One of my Nexus Players can handle a HDHomerun stream over WiFi no problem. So the SHIELD itself can do that unquestionably, the issue lies in network/reception/interference I'd gather.

g30_

The biggest problem with smart TV is for the future. When Android will become slow or not supported, the TV will be a crap. With an Android box, you just change it but here it's more complicated

BiggussDikkuss

Most of the issues with Android TV running on TV’s has been the cheap, slow, dinosaur, ancient chipset Sony used for years and years combined with a slow unoptimised Android OS, that produced a flea bitten and rancid Smart TV experience. This gave Android TV running on all smart TV a really bad rep.

These days most 2019 Sony mid & top range TV’s package nice powerful Mediatek chipsets, with an excellent ARM GPU and you end up with one snappy Smart TV package. Android TV Oreo or Pie running on such devices out of the box is also a Lot more optimised as well.

A good companion device to a decent Smart TV these days is something like a Gigabit LAN equipped ODROID N2, running 4K HDR CoreELEC Kodi / Plex / Emby because it just works and has virtually No Firmware issues or colorspace switching problems that seem to continually plague a device like the Nvidia Shield.

natethomas

It makes a lot of sense that any TV should be pretty good at playing back HDHomeRun content, because HDHomeRun devices send the unaltered stream directly from the antenna to the player, and TVs have to start out being able to play back ATSC streams with their own antenna. For a Shield, a 1080i ATSC scream is an addon. For any actual television with an RF input, it's the bread and butter of the system.

googgieg

I am far from a technophobe but I will always buy the best 'dumb' tv/monitor I can and hookup any gadget I want to it to make it smart.....Andorid box, RPie, HTPC