Sony launches new version of the best cheap 4K Blu-ray player that drops the streaming tech – but the price looks odd

www.techradar.com

26 comments

I hope we're not paying more for a player that does less…
You are and will be, as the cost of hardware in "smart" devices (and the reason that non-smart TV's no longer exist) are subsidized with on-device advertising and massive data collection/reselling.
- Yeah. Part of me wonders how much of a premium that making a TV dumb would be and if there is a large enough market that would buy into it.
  
  They already exist. You just have to look for "signage displays" or "commercial TV's", they come with all the smart crap stripped out.
  
  we need an OpenWRT but for TVs
  
  Why not purchase one subsidized by ads then just not connect it to the internet? Seems like a win-win
My number 1 requirement is being able to disable HDR, my sets don't implement it correctly and HDR content is unwatchable because of it.
The only fix is to disable it on the device as the sets don't have that option.
- Now I'm genuinely curious: what if you get a super-old and cheap HDMI cable? I'm talking like HDMI 1.2 or 1.4. What are the chances that your tv will be able to process whatever resolution video but not receive enough information to interpret HDR?
  Or, it'll likely be more like running gigabit from a cheap router over Cat3 or paired Cat1 where the high frequency generates so much noise on the low-quality unshielded twists of cable that it struggles to assign any standards and you end up with nothing.
  
  The cable would still need to do 4K though...
Does it play CD's too? I'm in the market for a new player.

26 comments