alt Hacker News>I went and researched this, and found that basically none of the TV brands were anything but creepy on privacy.
Yeah they do. Go to your shopping center or airport and you'll see LG and Samsung displays everywhere. And that's the key word, 'displays' not 'TVs'.
Both sell large displays meant for 100% user ownership with no spyware or mandatory internet connection, you just have to buy those and not their TVs.
The catch? They come at steep prices compared to consumer TVs, unless you can land a deal on the used market. But that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
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The other catch is that those displays are built for heavy duty use, not for picture quality, and as such aren’t going to look as good as even a budget consumer OLED TV.
Or jailbreak/defang the consumer TVs to have privacy anyway, and teach others how, and screw over the entire profit model of the surveillance-subsidized TVs to force things to be sold at a real cost.
I have bad news for you. Those commercial TV-s also phone home if connected to the internet. For software updates, analytics regarding digital signage usage etc.
For a long time they haven't been just dumb displays. They also run Tizen or WebOS for digital signage applications.
> that's the cost of turning a profit on screens with no spyware and ads.
I don't think that the cost of TVs has gone down when they added spyware and ads.
You could say that that's the cost of turning less profits, rather, and I suspect that TV manufacturers keep the costs of normal displays high just to discourage their purchase by normal people.
Are you sure those displays have everything needed for a smooth TV experience? Do they have eARC to connect a sound bar, and stuff like that? Modern TVs are also quite good at upscaling 1080/720p content, screens often aren't.
(I don't care about integrated speakers though)