TV & Home Theater

[jelabarre59]

Was looking at TVs at a local BB store this weekend.  Seems like EVERYONE has joined the lemming-rush to make "Smart" TVs with feet all the way out at the ends, and no control buttons.

So does **ANYONE** make a TV these days that doesn't depend on having a remote control to do ANYTHING with it?  Seems if your remote gets lost (quite likely in this household) or breaks (most likely with the sorts of cheap junk being made these days), etc., you end up with an expensive piece of inert useless junk.  Excessively-thin worthless junk at that.  Now I could probably get around the "Smart" TV foolishness by just not putting the device online, although the poor design of feet on the ends of the TV rather than a pedestal like our current TVs have is going to be a nuisance in itself.

Seems like the ONLY option for me these days will be to buy ONLY used TVs, because I have no desire to reward electronics manufacturers for their customer-hostile designs by being forced to buy something new that doesn't fit my needs. 

[bobberuchi]

What I did for my daughter was I purchased her a monitor instead.  The resolution is very good and it simply plugs in and you control the content from whatever your source is.

My TV has controls on the side and I hear where your coming from as I sometimes cannot find the remote so I simply walk over and press the buttons. 

[cr_client]

When I got a Samsung smart TV a few years ago, I was rather miffed that it didn't have traditional channel/volume switches on the console any longer, let alone a power button (I traditionally turned my TV and receiver on and off manually).

There IS a rocker switch underneath the console that serves as a multi-function button, with on-screen instructions on how to use it.

The supplied remote no longer has number keys to manually tune channels, either, which I also wasn't happy about.

I've found that I don't manually tune the TV any more (I use an over-the-air TiVo), and I only switch the input once every few weeks (between my non-4K receiver and the direct-in 4K input for my UHD-BD player or low-lag input for my game console) so even if I lost the teeny-tiny remote, I think I'd still be okay (even if unhappy).

Some of my old TVs, if they had been wall-mounted, would have been remote-only because the power, channel, and other functions were either on the top bezel or too high up the side to reach (depending on mounting height). I think this one would be manageable wall-mounted, but I would be even less happy without a remote in that case.

Of course, once I have children in the house, all of those feelings are subject to change. If I were to lose the remote in that case, I would most likely just set my TiVo or Receiver remotes up as a universal remote, which I haven't bothered to do yet.