LG OLED C1

I've owned Sony, Samsung, LG, TCL, Pioneer, Toshiba, Sharp, Amazon, and a variety of other flat panels over the years. I actually love the simplicity of the LG remote with the center button for play/pause. I don't need it to glow in the dark. I don't need to turn on my phone to find the button. I know exactly what button to press. Happy C1 owner over here since 2022. Still can't believe the quality of the image.

Well that's it. No more LG stuff for me. I bought the C1 OLED TV years ago, great TV, but with this BS, they lost me forever. And yes I connect the tv the wifi for YouTube and for my local media server. No, I do not want other intermediate devices , I want my TV to not spy on me.

When I think of smart TVs it's less about the kind of quality -of-life improvements you're describing and more about pushing users towards the in-TV apps and software to more effectively capture and sell usage data. Though I do have a funny interaction with the former kind of "smart features" with my (otherwise wonderful) LG C1 and PS5 where if I start the PS5 first it takes too long to trigger the TV to turn on and gets confused and puts the PS5 back to sleep as soon as the TV wakes up and switches to the input. But honestly I think I get more amusement than frustration watching the two smart devices outsmart each other constantly.

The LG C1 TV (and possibly any LG TV?) has a "Clear Voice" sound mode which make watching things using the TV speakers much better.

I use an OLED as well (an LG C1 48 inch TV as a monitor actually lol) so I made the background black as, like you, I think #000000 looks good on an OLED. However, it can look quite a bit harsher than softer colors such as on the Linear or Radix examples. It's okay if you're making a brutalist site like mine is (with bold, big text) but it doesn't really look that good for other site designs. All that being said, I use the browser extension Dark Reader to crank up backgrounds to #000000, but I think most people would be annoyed at pure black.

For a long time I found the single biggest difference between them to be: Even the best TVs had atrocious latency compared to cheap monitors. I don’t really know why this is, but it likely has something to expensive transformations to the video signal to “improve” quality. I have very pricy 1080p Samsung TV from 2013. Even in “Game Mode” I has latency of over 100ms. This enough to be noticeable in just moving a mouse around, let alone gaming. That has been mostly rectified nowadays. I have an LG C1 (42”) and use it for gaming and work. It has <1ms average latency and just enough pixel density for computer use. It does need a good desk though. The biggest remaining differences would be: - TVs tend to have a “smart interface”. This can generally be avoided if you are just switching between inputs. - TVs tend not to support DisplayPort input. - TVs tend require large desk stands and are not VESA compatible. You need a large desk to use one as a monitor. - Very few TVs with high quality panels are available in smaller more pixel dense sizes. I’m imagining this will become less of a problem with a move to 8k. - TVs tend to have almost unusable colour calibration out of the box. Rtings reviews tends to note how close the displays get to a standard colour profile after calibration. Many can be calibrated to a reasonable level though. - OLED panels are much more common in TVs.

The entire home cinema market is a colossal fuck up right now. For a start you’ve got multiple mutually incompatible HDR standards. Even if your TV supports everything, a step in your setup might not. e.g. my LG C1 supports Dolby Vision but my UHD Blu-Ray player (Xbox Series X) can only output DV from games and apps, not Blu-Rays. And that’s not considering that the TV, while incredible, doesn’t actually get anywhere near bright enough to display the full range of HDR. Audio isn’t much better: my receiver supports every audio codec under the sun but the TV can’t passthrough DTS for some reason so I have to have the Xbox decode it and just send plain stereo instead. The receiver can’t pass 4K 120Hz back to the TV so connecting the Xbox to that is a non-starter. Now the HDMI folks are following the insane lead of the USB guys and have decided that there is no longer a HDMI 2.0, and instead all HDMI 2.1 features are now just optional. So working out what your TV supports and may support in the future involves trawling spec sheets or even looking at the raw bandwidth of the HDMI ports. On top of that, TVs still ship with bananas default settings that make everything ultra-blue and motion interpolated so unless you have the knowledge and inclination everything just looks like crap anyway. At least Filmmaker mode is gaining some traction as a one-click way to get a decent picture. It’s a shame that the vast majority of people will never see the full potential of their AV systems.