Edit: thank you for all the kind suggestions! 🩷 I ended up keeping my current TV for now. I was this 🤏 close to buying a 48 inch LG B6E. Just before heading to the store, I got cold feet and decided to look through the settings of my current TV again. It’s a 43 inch Panasonic 6700 from 2020. I don’t know how I didn’t realize this until now, but I was actually able to remove ALL preinstalled apps, which made the TV way snappier. I also found, after an unreasonable amount of digging, that there is a setting under input sources - HDMI 1 called HDMI Ultra HD that was TURNED OFF by default. 😱 My only gripe with my Panasonic is that it emits a lot of heat. When I checked out the LG earlier today, it barely felt hot at all… Well well… The heatwave is passing anyways, so… 😅
While I would relish the opportunity to live the rest of my life with a CRT TV, those are unreasonably expensive, being vintage and whatnot… :(
For circa five years, I have been debloating, deslopping and deshittifying my smartphones. Is this something that can be done on a modern TV too?
Preferably, I’d skip all that and instead buy a no slop, no bullshit TV. I want it to have an HDMI port, next gen picture quality and a size of 43 inches, give or take. No budget limitations as of yet. Hit me with your best shot!
Slop/bullshit = apps, AI, anything not directly related to playing motion pictures over HDMI.
I have an LG C3 OLED from Costco and its easily the best TV I’ve ever had and got it for pretty cheap. Not sure if they make it in a smaller size than 55" though.
It does have smart slop integrated into it, but I blacklisted all the LG domains on my home router and haven’t been nagged by any of this stuff since.
Go one step further.
Get the LG TV’s MAC address, then from the router admin page (192.168.1.1), force your router to assign that LG TV’s MAC address a specific fixed IP address, and then block every single external port for that IP address… then you can do local smart home stuff like with Home Assistant, but the TV will not talk to anything externally.
Additionally, then plug in a dedicated smart TV box to the TV like an NVIDIA Shield for a couple hundred bucks, install a 3rd party launcher like FLauncher so no more Google bullshit shows up, replace YouTube with SmartTube Next so you have YouTube without ads, and then S0undTV to replace Twitch that then also has no ads.
Had that setup now for years. It’s amazing.
Oh dang I didn’t know about the twitch replacement. I’ll have to check it out!
It’s decent. Doesn’t get a ton of updates, like the quality setting is a little broken - if you have source selected sometimes it’ll be 480 when you switch streams, but if you choose auto it’ll work fine.