I used to have a TCL soundbar.
In addition to being extremely mediocre, it promised to integrate with my WiFi so that music could be airplayed through it. After adding it to my WiFi, it still broadcast the open ‘setup’ WiFi network.
If you joined the setup network, you could SSH into the soundbar as root without a password and dump the dhcp.conf file, which would give anyone access to my home WiFi network. Other TCL models also allowed for root via SSH, but used 12345678 as the password. A skilled hacker could just bot these via wardriving and turn them into network listeners.
It may have still broadcast the setup network because I blocked the device from accessing the internet. I only ever went poking around on it because I noticed that the setup network kept getting set to the same channels as my home network and it was causing interference. I eventually just factory reset the device so it had no information on it at all.
After the umpteenth time of not being found by my TV, a hard reset killed it. Just got stuck booting and never recovered.Anyway - crap brand. Sad day for Sony TV fans.
Make a dumb tv and I’ll be a buyer
Yeah, a dream: dumb TV with awesome modern panel and range of connectivity ports like HDMI, DP, DP over USB-C, composite, scart
I just want one DP input and I’ll decide how to split my inputs with an outside box. The TV should only decide how to show the picture. I don’t need your YouTube app
Look for “commercial display panels.” They’re 3-4 times the price of a smart TV, but they are just basic TVs. If you find a bank, hospital, clinic, or any other privacy focused business that’s going out of business you can generally pick those used displays up pretty cheap.
ive heard: buy one made for business
there’s a lot more options there, that dont have ads, etc
TCL TVs are fine for the price, but you use a TV with more processing power than whatever hamster wheel TCL uses and you get real lusty real fast. Painfully slow, unresponsive UI.
My TCL has been going strong for 8 years now. I’ll stand behind supporting That Cheap Life.
So Sony is now the new RCA. This is a new low for the company. I can’t believe that they are gone just like that.
Well, their TV brand is gone. Their headphones are still the top tier of consumer stuff and price-performance king for studio headphones
Being the best doesn’t mean they’re selling well… I assume you’re meaning 7506s? So yeah they’re awesome yet dirt cheap, I highly doubt they will keep Sony floating in the long term.
The over the ear noise cancelling one’s are amazing as well
Crazy. I have a Sony XBR 46” lcd that’s almost 20 years old. It still looks great for what it is (1080p and all). It was a top of the line tv back in the day that’s held its own for a very long time. It’s sad to see great companies/products fail.
Sony has always been shit at supporting their TV line. I certainly don’t slthink this means things will get any worse per se. Maybe some hope for improvement.
I had a TCL phone for a bit about 10 years ago and it was the hottest piece of garbage I had ever touched in my life
I bought a TCL TV a while ago. After a year, backlight died. So they sent me a new one. 6 months later, backlight died. Thankfully I got my money back this time and went with a different brand.
They’ve really worked to turn that around with their TVs. They’re entry level still sure, but for the price it’s hard to beat and their quality control on them has taken a big step up.
Their tvs are cheap because of all the ad and Spyware.
You mean the stuff every TV has these days? I also never hook mine to the internet so not really a problem. I haven’t seen a single ad in the year I’ve had mine
You can still get dumb tvs.
Edit: Yall. They are not hard to find. Please do a search of them. They can even be delivered right to your doorstep.
If you have a link or can tell me what store to walk in and get a dumb TV with even half the quality of my current TV I will take it. I could only find business displays which were all stuck at 60hz or had a color spectrum and contrast so bad my ten year old laptop IPS screen beat them.
Well I suspect the quality is not going to be up to your standard, but this is the one I have in my living room, and I think it’s perfectly fine. But if you just can’t live without 120hz or whatever, then I guess you’re stuck.
Walmart used to have a variety of these, now they’re down to one. All my TVs are either 10+ years old or Sceptre and therefore are all dumb. But I don’t have a purist bone in my body when it comes to AV stuff.
It’s not a bad TV. And if it was just watching movies or something I definitely wouldn’t care about 120hz, but it’s just so much better for gaming.
I’m not a purist, like I said I’m rocking a TCL which is low end, but I’ve come to appreciate some level of specs I can’t go back on.
You literally just linked me a 60hz business display. The thing I said was the only thing I could find and ruled out…
I would LOVE to know how!
Thrift
What disgusting cope. Don’t you have any self-respect?
Just because you can work around the abuse doesn’t mean they aren’t abusing you.
Edit: people like the commenter above are actively making the world worse by normalizing and even excusing abusive corporate practices. I apologize for nothing!
Dude, touch grass and calm down. You’re putting a lot of words in my mouth and completely missing the point which is why you’re getting down voted.
I’ve pushed back on “smart” TVs so much. My point was if your issue with TCL is the ads you should rightfully have issues with every TV. They’re all shoving ads, they’re all analysing watched content. This isn’t a TCL specific thing at all was my only point.
Also disconnecting from internet is a direct way of fighting back against that abuse. You’re not giving them those analytics or ad space. Sure you can choose to not buy any TV but I clearly keep overestimating people’s intelligence and didn’t think I needed to spell out every possible option in a quick comment.
Fuck I hate the braindead keyboard warriors the internet has enabled.
Quantity control :D
You saw nothing! ＼(°o°)／ Ever since I added my Welsh keyboard my autocorrect just doesn’t even try anymore on my phone.
Non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/noqtk
Thanks.
I don’t really know why it is so hard for people to post things like this in the beginning. It’s just a way to annoy us because they should know we all don’t intend to pay some subscription to read news.
Because it’s even easier to just set up the right filters in uBO and never have to think about it again
People dont go read an article then frantically look for the same article on another website before sharing it
i suggest, the link posted on lemmy, is translated to archive.ph, if one is available. But that requires work …
Besides the paywall.
It doesn’t sound to me that this is making Sony go away from a market, it just sounds like they’ll still be involved.
This is good news as far as I’m concerned. I was burned by an expensive Bravia TV with a lack of promised feature support, poor quality control, zero customer support, and unfixable hardware design flaws that made several prominent features permanently unusable.
TCL on the other hand might have always been a budget brand, but their TVs are very well made considering their price point. They are much more competently made TVs with a level of quality control that blows Sony out of the water. If they commit to making the Bravia series at its current price point, as opposed to just turning the Bravia line into budget TVs, I’m reasonably confident they can deliver.
It’s like when IBM left its PC manufacturing to Lenovo. And, probably a ton of other examples I’ve never paid any attention to.
It’s starting to feel like only old people look at a screen bigger than six inches. That, combined with displays becoming a commodity item, leads to the manufacturing being abandoned to commodity manufacturers. If Sony could bring anything of value that would justify the cost of holding on to this, they would. Sony’s name hasn’t been synonymous with quality for decades now, that’s partly their own doing through poor choices, but also the quality of cheap displays is perfectly adequate for most people.
Dafuq are you on about, Sony’s image processing and colour reproduction is one of if not the best in the entire display industry.
They were getting squeezed by Samsung and LG display for their OLED products so they just decided to engage in a joint venture with TCL that results in less costly manufacturing while leveraging the brand recognition and existing distribution channels. Basically TCL becomes an OEM. It’s not ideal but if this was to be avoided, we should have detached from the US based order in the 80s when it became obvious the US doesn’t like to compete and sniped the entire Japanese economy.
Sony’s main tech was in manufacturing. TCL will be getting a HUGE upgrade.
So… on the customer market only PlayStation needs to flop and Sony is gone forever
Honestly sounds like nothing is really changing except branding and maybe where panels are sourced from.
You sound like a person that hasn’t had the pleasure of owning a TCL TV (hint: it sucks).
This is Sony checking out and letting the remaining good will of one of their few reputable product be wrung out for cash. As another commenter said, this is Sony becoming the new RCA.
Higher end TCL TVs are actually pretty good. All comes down to people buying entry model ones which are poor from most manufacturers and severely underpowered.
We have/had two, the entry level one was full on crappy as you alluded to, but the higher end TV, while it had a decent panel was a shitshow due to the software. I ended up having to factory reset it and just never connect it to the internet to get it usable again after a series of terrible “enhancements”. This is my main problem with where I see Sony TVs going. If having great panels/displays was all that mattered, higher end Samsung and LG TVs would still be good choices too.
They already arent making panels now. They are just breaking the illusion. If anything this is honesty.
They actually do still make some nigher end/niche displays I believe, but they spun their main LCD panel group off and it merged with another company. That all being said, the displays weren’t the big point here. I wouldn’t use a TCL or Samsung if they had the best displays because they load them bullshit software and I don’t trust them.
For now
Makes sense, bc idk anybody with a Sony TV anymore. Even loyalist fans friends of mine from the CRT days switched.
I own a sony TV. The hdtvtest guy is my goto for staying updated on TV tech and sony regularly comes out as his best of the year. Yes, they’re pricey but you’re getting something for that premium.
This is a sad day in my books now that TCL will be able to enshittify the Sony brand.
When 4k/120 TVs came out, their Bravia was the best midrange you could get. Price doubled to get anything better.
Their early “4k/120s” weren’t even actually 4k/120. Enabling 120hz refresh rates on early Bravias would cut horizontal resolution in half, and then crudely attempt to upscale it.
I mean the true 120hz, not the upscaled crap.
They came out the same time hdmi got the bandwidth capacity, so before that, it wasn’t even possible.
I partly use Rtings.com for my info, and they test everything.
No I know what you mean. I’m not talking about the “Trumotion” 120hz motion smoothing technology.
The first generation of Sony Bravia TVs that advertised native 4k/120hz, specifically to coincide with the release of the PS5, couldn’t actually do native 4k/120hz. It wasn’t until their following generations that were finally able to, in a post-launch firmware update.
Sony TVs are absolute garbage devices designed by actual morons, with the worst customer support in the industry.
Back when the PS5 came out, they advertised their Bravia TVs specifically for its support for the PS5 and its feature set. I spent something like $1,200 for a Bravia x900H which at the time was very highly reviewed. When the PS5 released shortly after, we had to wait months for Sony to actually release drivers to support the PS5 features promised like VRR and 4k/120hz, and when they finally did the monkeys paw finger curled. If you turn VRR on, it disables local dimming. This is important because those panels look like dogshit without local dimming. So right off the bat you have to choose between a smooth picture, and a good looking picture.
As for 4k/120, they cheaped out on the MediaTek processor so it can’t actually do native 4k/120. Turning it on halves the horizontal resolution to 1080, and then it crudely upscales it back up causing a now infamous blurry mess to the picture.
Those are just the problems that affect everyone due to design flaws and false advertising. But on a more luck-of-the-draw level, when I bought mine brand new, it had significant backlight bleed. I was upgrading from a $150 Costco LCD and I swear to you the picture on the Sony was actually worse. 25% of the screen was permanently tinted blue the bleed was so bad. No problem I thought, I just bought the thing brand new, these things happen with LED panels from time to time, I’ll call Sony and RMA the thing. But after a week of arguing with Sony’s outsourced support, they refused to honor the warranty. According to them backlight bleed is expected and no matter how bad it is, they don’t cover it under warranty. So whether or not your Sony TV is even functional as a TV is simply luck of the draw.
I have no doubts about your experience. I can only rely on personal experience, which has been the exact opposite, and that of expert reviewers.
Ive got a Bravia. They’re good like upper midrange TVs, like the top end before you really start spending crazy cash
I’m not meaning nobody owns them, just a lot of the people I knew back in the day who were die-hard Sony fans, have moved on due to price or quality or both. My dad was one of them with a full high end Sony TV (36" CRT Trinitron series) and receiver, dual cassette deck, CD player, etc lol. Yes, this was the 90s, but still.
I do, and it’s great. It isn’t OLED, but the 4K panel is still decent. It has thin bezels, lots of inputs, and most importantly, it’s just old enough to not run android. I’ll take this thing to my grave.
My 4k/120 one just started getting a few dead pixels. It’s on almost everyday for a hours between me and the kids.
Every friend or acquaintance that has asked me “What TV should I get if I want a really nice LCD TV?” was always told Sony, so I know lots of people with them. I guess I have no good answer for these people now, every brand other than Sony had become enshittified.
I honestly don’t mind TCL, they’ve really come a long way, especially for the price! I have the 2022 TCL 85R655 that was rated extremely well, and supported all the Series X features (ALLM, VRR, 4K/120, HDR10 +DV gaming, etc for $1800) and that only replaced my 2016 LG 65UH8500 because, well, way better specs (minus no 3D anymore lol).
I had an issue with the PCB 12 months into warranty (literal days left) and I got a full refund because they had already replaced that model with the next Gen and didn’t have the proper parts available or something to fix.
The picture quality, when calibrated, is pretty damn good despite not being OLED.
The higher end TCL have very good specs, but my issue is only with the software. At this point I’ve been leaning towards “dumb” TVs. My most recent TV is not a smart TV and can’t be retroactively ruined with ads or additional spyware. I just wish there were high end models available for when my larger living TV bites the dust.
Ah, see, ok, that makes sense. I forget most everyone else in the real world isn’t obsessed with ad-blocking like me. So, this one is Roku but I have others that are Fire TV and Android (all TCL). None are connected online, and honestly it’s creepy as FUCK that the fire TV has never been connected to the Internet, yet still somehow has its own ads for shows update every so often. IDK if they’re cross-communication like a mesh network of TVs so if one is offline it can still get some sort of content refresh, or what, but I don’t like that it knows to update/refresh with no network.
Amazon does have a patent specifically for that sort of mesh-like communication, so it is possible. The TCLs I have/had were Roku based, but kept getting worse and worse until I gave one away and reset and disconnected the other. I also refuse to see ads, but that wasn’t really an issue because I didn’t use any services that showed ads. Then the TVs themselves started to and I was done. I think many of the manufacturers are getting wise to the “never connecting” trend and making it more and more obnoxious. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if most TVs started becoming unbearably naggy until you connect it to an internet connection. A friend of mine also recently got another TCL TV, this one being Amazon Fire based. Apparently, it was so bad he just gave it away within the first couple of months (it was a really cheap TV).
