The specs and quality of the panel, backlighting (if applicable), and image processing. These days, the few "dumb" TVs that are still sold are either cheap and bad or are designed for signage use and aren't well suited for TV/movies/games relative to their mass-market smart cousins.

A smart TV used as a dumb TV alongside a quality streaming box (Apple TV or Nvidia Shield TV) or console gets you the best overall experience.

There's a variety of reasons, but many of us don't want any of the "smartness" and all of the stupidity that comes with "Smart TV's" these days, but don't really have comparable "dumb" options at similar or cheaper price points. The Telemetry (ACR), unremovable copilot app getting added to LG TV's, or all the Ad's Samsung are cramming into their "smart" garbage are three prime examples, but certainly not the only reasons I hate smart TV's (or really any device marketed as "smart") these days.

Most importantly though, can you even get non-smart TV's these days that aren't super budget items? To my knowledge that's pretty much not a thing anymore (yes there are presentation displays and large format monitors, but that gets into the weeds fast about feature/panel/spec differences, not to mention price differences)

You get a much cheaper TV. The folks who manufacture the TV expect to make a certain amount of revenue from your data, so they price this into the cost of the TV. This saves you from having to spend more money on a commercial display that often has a worse panel.

One answer is that all you wanted was bright, sixty inch monitor for your living room, into which you could plug your HDMI sources, but all you could get (subject to various other constraints: price, quality, availability, non-smart features you do care about, ...) was a smart TV, whose "smart" features you explicitly don't want.

You don't have to use every feature of something for it to make sense. I have a "dumb" TV. It has built-in speakers, but I don't use those. Volume is set to minimum. My streaming box connects to decent bookshelf speakers.

The best (in terms of image quality) consumer displays on the market right now are OLED TVs from LG and Samsung. But they’re also “Smart” TVs.

I keep mine disconnected and use an external media box (AppleTV 4K).

It's more that they don't sell dumb TVs anymore, so you have to simulate it yourself by preventing Internet access.

Now, whether it won't nag you to connect with pop ups is a different question.

I don't use the Smart features and instead use a $30 Amazon Fire TV stick (for streaming services) and a Raspberry Pi (for torrents).

This has the major advantage that if the streaming hardware is ever obsoleted for any reason (ie, Netflix decides my TV is too old to support a compression codec they want to switch to), I only have to buy a new media player for $30 and not a whole new TV.

The point is I don’t want my TV, my refrigerator, my toaster, my dishwasher, or my washing machine to be “smart” or to have any AI or internet connectivity.

These all have a very simple job to do, and there’s absolutely zero value-add to the smart edge software nonsense.

The ability to own a TV at all, since even the cheaper sets now have this nonsense built right in. Loosely I think the idea is to subsidize the cost of the hardware with the marketing deals, but I don't actually know.

The difficulty of buying a dumb TV.

Mine's in the living room hooked up to a gaming PC, and I don't watch TV/movies.

Well, there's little choice for TVs without smart features these days. Especially if you're wanting certain quality and other features.

> What’s the point in having smart TV without internet access?

The difficulty in finding an affordable TV without smart functionality alone means that you're most likely buying a smart TV.

I yet again bought a Samsung smart tv (despite having sworn never to do so again..) and I'm never letting it connect to the internet after what happened to the last one.