I am only comparing it to the Samsung. And for what it’s worth, I have not been buying cheap Samsung TVs. Also yes. You get what you pay for. But also, I have other reasons to not pay the Sony premium. I can actually mildly tolerate Android TV and its stupid home screen ads, for some reason, but having it shipped with my TV seems like a step too far, and that’s exactly what Bravia TVs do.

My only real option is to have a monitor and use that as a TV. But aside from a lot of other downsides, like no TV remote and a UX not designed to handle TV use cases, and builtin speakers that are just embarrassing, large monitors are also horridly expensive and the most likely to have extremely bad problems (like the horrible backlight bleed on some of the larger screen options from ViewSonic.)

A big reason I bought the Sharp TV is because it has Android TV built in. When it's disconnected from the internet (I haven't connected it to the internet except once to update the firmware), it behaves just like a monitor. Turn it on, it fast-boots in 3 seconds and displays HDMI1 (the last input I selected).

I can give you at least one reason why I do not own a Sharp TV: I haven’t actually seen one for sale. The most obvious place to buy one locally is Best Buy, and my Best Buy has legitimately zero. I could, of course, buy one online, but for TVs I generally haven’t done this in the past. There’s obviously pros and cons to this.

This is all getting very silly though. We went from a market where you got what you paid for to well,… this. You can get what you paid for… kind of, if you don’t care about certain things and do fairly thorough research. And sure. I can try to dilligently pick an option that works best for me. The average consumer is getting completely fucked, however, and they are the ones driving all of the demand.

We've gone from a market where you got shit if you weren't careful, to a market where you get shit if you're not careful.

JVC and Panasonic produced garbage CRTs and VCRs and DVD players and stereo equipment for years, but they sold like hotcakes because they were cheap. You had to choose carefully what to buy, and make sure the place had a decent return policy just in case. There were some brands with good reputations, others that were hit-or-miss, and some just plain garbage. Now is no different.

FWIW I bought the Samsung and the Sharp online through Amazon (because they have a good return policy). I returned the Samsung and kept the Sharp.

> JVC and Panasonic produced garbage CRTs and VCRs and DVD players and stereo equipment for years, but they sold like hotcakes because they were cheap.

Yes. That’s not the market today. If we were talking about truly cheap TVs, I’d be talking about Insignia and subsidized crap like FireTV. I’m talking about Samsung TVs with “quantum dot technology” and whatever other yahoo crap.

Back then, you could most definitely buy any decent Samsung CRT and be confident it wasn’t going to suck. Hell, the model of Samsung CRT TV I had as a kid is now often used for RGB modding because of its excellent picture quality and the fact that they’re mostly still around and working great. Was it expensive at the time? No. It wasn’t.

Certainly if you bought a Trinitron back in the day you knew you weren’t getting ripped off. Is it the same with Sony Bravia? I’m not willing to incinerate money at a high enough rate to find out, but the fact that it comes with Android TV stock makes me unhopeful. My car comes with Android 4.2 and that’s aged about as well as polio by this point.

The market today for consumer electronics is completely ass. Not only do the cheap options suck ridiculously badly, even the expensive options are hard to stomach.