I'm less bothered by the ever present smart tv and more bothered that there is no way to just turn on the tv and go straight to input from a certain port. Would love to know TV's that just do that. My old Samsung constantly forces me to click through sources and out of smart features to get to the hdmi from my computer everytime I turn it on.
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I just bought a LG 50" UA7000 [1] that goes straight to HDMI on turning on. I am using it as a additional screen for my laptop. I am hoping using one screen two feet away and one screen 6 feet away will preserve my eyesight a bit longer.
A minor problem is that it displays "Turning on AI voice features" every time I turn it on, but those features are not actually turned on. It probably tries to, but since I never connected the TV to the internet, this fails. Still have to figure out how to get rid of the message.
[1] https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/lg-50-ua7000-4k-uhd-hdr...
We have two Hisense TVs that both allow this. One is Roku based and the other Google TV. Neither is connected to wifi. I’d recommend the Google flavor, it has a lot more control over the settings and will auto suspend in a reasonable period if no input is being sent. The Roku’s minimum auto suspend is 4 HOURS.
They were cheap and the picture quality is great. Not OLED level, but jeeze I had to share a 27” CRT for my SNES as a kid—
Samsung had a hidden hospitality menu, or hotel mode, search for how to access it for your model. You can have it go right to an input on power on.
Getting an hospitality variant tv might be an option too. I have a Samsung one which does have some smart features but they are mostly backend related. I think there's only YouTube on the user facing side. I got it because they are support to be better TVs for the money but it was such a huge pain to set up that I wouldn't do it again.
My recent Sony TV does this.
But also I pretty much never use the TV button to turn it on, I click a button on one of the connected devices to wake it and the TV turns itself on with that input selected. Even if it’s already on, if I want to switch from one device to another I can just wake the other device and it will switch inputs for me. It works really well, I almost never have to use the input selector and it just does the right thing reliably.
HDMI CEC should be able to to turn on TVs direct to the input. Sadly few desktops seem to support it.
Apparently "almost no PC GPU has hardware support for CEC" according to Arch. Wonder if that is outdated and modern GPUs do?
This is still pretty much the case. There are ways to do it (i.e. adapters that sit between your HDMI cable and GPU) but it’s wonky.
The Steam Machine will support CEC, hopefully other PC vendors will take note and adopt it.
My Samsung QN90B does that just fine, it's only a few years old. IIRC there's a setting somewhere in the menu to not boot to the home screen. It also doesn't nag me about anything, although I only enable wifi when I want to update.
Just checked now: the setting is General & Privacy -> Start Screen Options -> Start with Smart Hub Home.
Is the input device on prior to turning the tv on? Some of them will automatically switch if an input is on or gets switched on.
LG (UT8000 at least) TVs have an option to default to last used input, that works reliably.
Roku has this feature.