The Forever TV

A key piece of advice during the ongoing RAM crisis has been that the best time to buy a new device was yesterday, while the next best time to buy a new device is right now. One area where that hasn't proven entirely true, at least when it comes to prices, is TVs.

There are so many options when it comes to TVs these days, though.

Which path to choose?

Right now, with Labor Day sales approaching, Patrick is on the path to a new television. In pursuit of a "Forever TV," or at least one he won't replace until it's broken. The notion of what defines a "Forever TV" depends on where that TV is going to live and who's using it.

Naturally, Rob has thoughts.

Rob: Patrick, I saw you were looking at TV recommendations and I was kind of surprised at how little conviction I felt in making one. I'm not actually sure it's a great time to be buying one or, at least, the answers and trade-offs are not as clear to me as they've been in the last five or ten years.

In TV-review land, TCL and Hisense have made huge inroads with non-OLED display technologies that have let them make huge 80+ inch TV screens that are way, way less expensive than their equivalent OLEDs. They are being framed by a lot of reviewers as landscape-changing devices, offering color accuracy, brightness, and black levels that are nearly as good or sometimes better than the OLEDs that have dominated the high-end TV market since they were invented.

But that's a narrative that's driving a lot of the way discussion around new TVs is framed. OLEDs advantages are still real (by their very nature, they cannot be bested on contrast by a display that uses backlighting, no matter how sophisticated). I've also heard mixed things about how the big Mini-LED TVs deal with high-framerate content like, you know, video games. Nobody says these things are deal-breakers but are they the kind of thing that would drive you nuts if you owned one, despite the money you'd saved? MK and I are both wired to fixate on imperfections. We don't acclimate to them, we dwell on them. I don't think they would bug you the same way, but I don't know. 

I suspect you'd love a TCL QM8L or a Sony Bravia 9 II (their top-end Mini-LED model). But the reservations reviewers make around them leave me wondering if the gains they've made on OLED TVs are overstated in part because "OLED is best display technology" is an old, and therefore boring, story.

The TV size you're looking at is tricky. Sony doesn't make an 80-inch OLED TV. LG and Samsung do, but Samsung has a kind of philosophical (and financial) objection to Dolby Vision and doesn't support it. But does it make that big a difference? It's not like if you don't have a Dolby Vision display you don't get HDR. Every piece of content is still mastered to work with HDR10 (thought not Samsung's preferred HDR10+, their open-source alternative to Dolby Vision).

If Dolby Vision is important to you, well, they are in the process of rolling out Dolby Vision 2, which requires hardware changes to compatible TVs, so you couldn't update a TV to support it. Is it worth delaying a purchase to get that bit of possible future-proofing? Again, I'm not sure. It will be years before enough people have gotten new Dolby Vision 2 TVs so Dolby Vision / HDR 10 are likely to be what TV, movie, and streaming companies focus on supporting.

Until recently, the LG G-series OLEDs would have been my instant-recommendation for someone looking for a great 80+ inch TV that would be the center of a home theater for years. But I have to admit, the invasive ad tech on their TVs has really chilled me on the brand. The fact that you could plug an LG monitor into a PC and instantly installed adtech spyware is shocking to me. That their TOS for their TVs forces you you accept that they will be recording what their TV remote's microphone picks up is likewise unacceptable. The solution is to never connect the TV to the internet and just use something like the AppleTV 4K to serve as the TV's operating system, but I feel like whenever a company is caught doing something scummy, the drunk-driving principle applies. Almost nobody is ever pulled-over the first, second, or even third time they drive drunk. A single incident strongly implies a pattern. LG loaded-up on invasive ad tech and privacy-violating standard procedures. Is that what I want in my home?

But then again, TCL and Hisense broadly do the same stuff. Sony does it, despite being the brand that charges the highest premium for its products. Hell, we've both remarked how TVs have seemed almost impervious to the inflationary cycle that's defined the past few years. Part of it is the companies driving that market are bringing more manufacturing capacity on-line and unlocking more efficiencies but for our entire adult lives, when sophisticated technology is sold cheap or free, it's your data that turns out to be the product and TCL and Hisense built their entire brands around selling excellent displays for bargain-basement prices.

So maybe air-gapping your TV, literally never connecting it your home network, is the move. Which sucks because sometimes a TV's native apps perform better than their Apple TV or PS5 equivalents. The difference in visual quality on Andor when viewed through the TV's Disney+ app versus the Apple TV Disney+ app was clear and obvious, though I have no idea why. Contrast was way better on the TV app, while the Apple's rendering never quite hit the same perfect contrast levels, always looking like you'd slightly turned up your brightness or gamma levels too high. Still, if it's between that and having LG just running a wiretap on my family, I guess I'll leave it disconnected forever.

I'm curious, are any of these factors on your radar? I know you collect horror discs at a faster rate than you watch them, but it certainly seems like you like having the option of going full "reference theater" accuracy if you can get it. But what are the must-haves and nice-to-haves for you in a family room home theater scenario?

Patrick: I couldn’t get into this in my flippant Bluesky post in-between taking the garbage out, but when I said I was interested in buying a “Forever TV,” I think that forecasted a certain version of the TV I was looking for that is different than the TV than I am actually looking for. Because it’s a “Forever TV” for a very specific room, with very specific use cases, and that is not aligned with anything like a “reference theater.”

Let me back up.

One, and this will not surprise you or anyone else, the display on which I play something does not matter that much to me. It’s why I’d happily pay thousands for a souped up Steam Deck, OLED screen or not, because the convenience factor is paramount for me. Also, and this will also not surprise you or anyone else, the idea of spending thousands of dollars on a single television makes me want to break out in hives.

Two, the room this TV will live in is multi-purpose. It’s the family room. It’s docked next to two very bright windows that blast onto the TV much of the day. It doesn’t make watching the TV unwatchable—well, at least by my own standards—but you truly can’t watch anything dark until the sun is heading down. Kids are going to accidentally put their fingers on the TV. (We frequently are hosting people with much younger kids than our own.) You can’t invest in much more than a modest soundbar because there’s not great placement for additional speakers, and if you’re too loud, the sound will bleed into the kids’ rooms anyway. 

Three, the TV I’ve had for the past six-ish years is a 70-inch Vizio. It’s fine. It has 4K but no HDR. It was a TV my neighbor already had for two years before passing it my way. But the inputs are getting weird, the HDMI handshakes are failing, and more importantly, the cheap $250 Walmart TV that I bought for my deck has a display that is so notably better that it’s started bugging me when I watch something on the deck!!!!