“Despite the CES Hype, It’s Better to Wait on That 4K TV” is a nytimes.com story by a journalist who was underwhelmed at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas).
Personally I would be interested in a TV operating system that had reasonably good digital picture frame capabilities. I wrote about this in 2010 (Why don’t people use a small TV as a digital picture frame?) and in 2012 (Best LCD television for use as a digital photo display?), but I don’t know of any 2016 model that meets the basic requirements, i.e., can turn itself on automatically at 8 am, go into photo display mode, and, ideally, pull images from a local or cloud-based server (Google Photos for example).
What do readers think? Any exciting TV (or other) news from CES?
[Personally I’m kind of interested in the Thinkpad Yoga with an OLED screen. I’m not sure how this would be better than a Microsoft Surface Book, though. Lenovo’s prices seem a lot better. It is $1400 for an LCD-screen Yoga with 16 GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. That’s a $2700 configuration from Microsoft. Screen size and resolution is about the same. The software is the same Windows 10, right? The Surface Book has a fancier graphics card but I’m not a gamer.]
I too have long thought the TV as digital picture frame was an important and overlooked use case. I blogged about it in 2008 and more recently (http://mondegreen2.blogspot.com/search?q=screensaver). Back when Bill Gates was building a billionaire’s mansion 25 years ago, people thought this was a really big deal.
For my situation, I have found that Chromecast is about a 70% solution. So long as you have your TV switched to its HDMI input, there are lots of options for displaying photos, including your own Google photos. There are also third-party apps and photo-sharing sites. Really striking and beautiful photos out there, like having an amazing photo exhibit in your own home.
The missing refinements, for your use case: 1) Have to set the HDMI input manually. That is a drag, but if you use your Chromecast for Netflix, that may be the default input anyway. 2) Timer to turn on at 0800 may be a bit hacky. I tend to leave mine on all the time. But if your TV has an auto-on timer, that might work. Because once the TV is on, with the right input, Chromecast will go into screensaver photo mode automatically.
The consumer electronics companies are terrible at software. Samsung seems to be coming to this realization so maybe in the near future things will get better. In the mean time you would have to cobble something like this yourself.
Some TVs have on/off timers built in. I have a six year old 50″ LG TV that is scheduled to turn on at 6:00 AM and off at 6:00 PM, with a laptop displaying network statistics in my poor-man’s NOC.
I suppose you could use an AppleTV/Chromecast to display cloud-based photos instead of a laptop.
You could use HDMI-CEC (from a laptop or maybe a RasPI) to power on/off a TV that doesn’t have the timer feature. You could even go super old-school and use IR driven by an Arduino.
Most consumer electronics have been marketed based on hardware features, I don’t see many people at Best Buy playing with the menus or trying out the software, they buy on price and prettiness.
–Ed
Hard to argue that you should wait on 4K. Until they get a full system from source to display with all the promised wider color gamut, HDR, etc. features that have shown they can play nice with one another I’m certainly staying out.
After watching 2001 in good old analog 70mm film over the weekend, then comparing it to my Blu-Ray copy on a prosumer projector afterwards I think extra sharpness, gamut and dynamic range would be nice to have (all were lesser on blu-ray, perhaps my projector’s fault to a large extent), but likely only for those few movies that would likely take advantage of it. I could care less about the above for sitcoms.
Most people will stay happy with their current 1080p/720p sets until they fail, not a good market to be in.
I use an AppleTV as a digital picture frame when it is not a television. I haven’t fiddled with the on/off with a schedule, but I think it is possible I can do that. More importantly, I think someone could now write an app for the AppleTV that does what you are talking about.
Expensive, but for your picture frame requirement: https://depict.com/
I have considered buying dedicated digital picture frame, but the products I looked at had too many artificial limitations. I was puzzled as to why the products were not programmable.
On a loosely related topic, I’m really curious to know what you think about the Ehang 184 they showed off at CES (http://www.ehang.com/ehang184).
Why would you want to buy a Windows tablet for this application? I paid $900 for my 49″ LG from B&H, plus $200 for a beefy but fully articulated wall mount that even this klutz could install by himself in his 1936 vintage home.
Progress has actually been astounding. Just go have a look at the $4K LG 4K OLEDs, and this year’s 2.7mm thin models with HDR look to be stunning. TVs are traditionally kept for quite a while, but at current prices, most people can afford to swap them out (or hand them down) after a couple of years.
I have a 2014 Samsung 4K TV (50HU8550) and a 2015 LG (49UF7600). The SmartTV OS makes a huge difference – the Samsung SmartHub is a usability nightmare, whereas the LG webOS 2.0 is actually pretty good, if occasionally glitchy. As a bonus, webOS apps are written using good old web HTML5 + JavaScript technology, no Java required, nor the ensuing layers and layers of over-engineered abstraction. I would expect Sony TVs using the Android TV platform to be also good, as like webOS the Android OS was designed by people with a clue about software. I don’t have cable TV and so couldn’t care less about set-top box integration. My AppleTV and Amazon FireTV collect dust since I got the SmartTVs.
My only issue is SmartTVs don’t usually play well with the Apple ecosystem (AirPlay), but that’s really Apple’s proprietary fault. Neither is there a simple way to connect to Lightroom, at least not on the don’t-be-a-peon-on-Adobe’s-plantation-forever non-subscription perpetual license edition.
Fazal: Thanks for the info. I don’t want to buy a Windows tablet as a TV or photo frame. I want to buy a Windows tablet to use as a Windows tablet! (edit documents in Word, pull files from Dropbox, browse with Chrome, look at documents with Acrobat).
4K TV technology has a chicken and egg problem – people don’t see the need for the hardware because there’s no 4K content available for it and there’s no content because no one owns the hardware to play it with.
One of the things that has made matters worse is HDCP 2.2, which is the content industry’s latest effort at copy protection (and which has, BTW, already been broken even before it’s widespread adoption). Unless every single piece of hardware in the chain is HDCP 2.2 compliant, you won’t be able to see or hear your content, so you have to replace your entire A/V system with new hardware, not just the TV. And if you bought a 4k TV that is not HDCP 2.2, forget it, it will never play any commercial 4k content. The whole idea of content protection is fundamentally unsound from a cryptographic POV . In a truly sound encryption scheme you never give an untrusted party the key (but for “content protection” the key must be present or you could never see the content at all). The best they can do is try to obfuscate where and how they are hiding the key in the hardware but the keys inevitably leak.