Looks like Valve also needs to start making SteamTV, just a TV without any "smart" spyware/adware OS. Until then.. this blackfriday I ordered a TV that by miracle even has a DisplayPort input (Hisense 65U8Q). Unfortunately still "smart" TV but at least it does not have US-based OS but European made VIDAA which hopefully provides much less spyware than the US-alternatives, if it properly respects the EU GDPR laws. Hopefully Hisense starts/inspires a bigger movement towards DisplayPort and this HDMI mafia dies as soon as possible.
They could also potentially sidestep the issue by designing a discrete DisplayPort to HDMI chip into the system, so the HDMI 2.1+ implementation is firewalled from the open source stack. Maybe next time, if the HDMI Forum still hasn't budged by then.
Yeah, the chip they used isn't ideal though because it converts DP1.4 (32Gbit) to HDMI 2.1 (48Gbit), so the bandwidth is bottlenecked on the input side. Ideally you'd want a chip which takes DP2.1, which I'm not sure exists yet, and the upcoming Steam Machine only supports DP1.4 so it wouldn't have helped in that case anyway.
Imagine a Steam TV with the Steam Box simply built-in. That would be incredibly nice. The worst part of my brand new LG G5 OLED TV is the software itself. I'd pay a good deal more to have Valve responsible for the software running on my TV.
It might be nice for a little while, but the PC component is going to age much more poorly than the display will.
I think the better move would be for Valve to make a really nice gamer-oriented dumb TV that's essentially a 50"+ monitor. Kind of like those BFGDs (Big Format Gaming Displays) sans the exorbitant prices. The size of a Steam Box is in comparison quite diminutive, so finding a place to put it shouldn't be too much of an issue and the ability to swap it out for a newer model with the same screen 5+ years down the road would be nice.
There's actually a quasi-standard of TV-compute unit interface made for industrial displays. This could be really nice for things like steam cards that could just slot into TVs with whatever performance you need.
And even better make it as open as Steam Deck/Machine and allow to install any GNU/Linux distribution onto it maybe even something with KDE Plasma Bigscreen or something similar if desired.
The TV manufacturers still make it highly annoying to avoid their integrated bullshit now. The setting to launch an LG WebOS TV into its last input on power-on is buried under 'advanced settings' several menus deep.
They would rather launch you into their home hub full of preinstalled apps even if it's not online...
... and the thing came with Microsoft Copilot installed, and you couldn't uninstall it, either.
This trick unfortunately falls down above a certain size, especially if you want to game at a good fps, and stay in the consumer space (price) rather than the commercial display space. That gigabyte 45 inch is too small to use above your fireplace and view across the living room.
In my case I compromised on needing 4k, and got an lg 65 inch with only HDMI.
I have been doing A/V systems professionally for many years and the best system I have found recently is a Sony TV with an Apple TV. No sign-in needed for the TV for basic setup, can be easily set to come on to a particular input, works well with the Apple remote, and functions well with no internet with just a little corner pop-up saying "no internet" when you first turn it on.
You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
> You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
Can you update via USB? I know my (couple years old now) Samsung TVs have firmware downloads available so you don't even need to connect the TV to anything.
Yes. I've owned a couple Android-based Sony TVs in the past decade and they both support updating firmware via USB thumb. They also support installing/removing packages with ADB, just like one would with an Android phone, in the case that there's some offline app you want to use on it. The newer models also do a neat thing where if you have external speakers hooked up, its internal speakers can be repurposed for center channel audio which is super cool.
I'll echo the Apple TV + Sony TV combo. It's very solid.
Apple + Sony sounds like a pretty nice combo, although unsurprisingly, right? It is a combination of premium brands. (Of course often premium brands are actually garbage in a nice shell, so maybe it is surprisingly not surprisingly bad, haha).
Projectors can be an option but the price point to get anything comparably good in terms of picture quality puts you squarely back in commercial TV pricing.
I don’t own a TV, but would’ve bought a LG just because of webOS if I finally decided to get one. But if it comes with uninstallable Microsoft apps, that changes it.
My recent-model Samsung TV repeatedly opens a pop-up info window about their AI features while my AppleTV is playing movies and shows.
So I didn’t connect the TV OS and it’s still thrown in my face. It’s not the end of the world to have to find the tv remote and dismiss a popup every few days, but I sure would welcome competition who doesn’t try this sort of nonsense.
I've found you have to stay granular, i.e. to the model level rather than the brand level, or you end up with basically no consumer focused brand to pick from (or, even more likely, a misunderstanding that a given brand had no such problems because you didn't casually run across an example).
Popping up dialogs in the middle of watching a movie sounds like a hidden manufacturing defect. That should be enough to get your money back on returning it to the shop (assuming your country has anything resembling consumer protection laws).
