Things do not last forever

Saturday, June 1st, 2024 at 01:38pm

My house was built in the early 1970s but fortnuately the previous owners had redone the kitchen, bathroom and a few other things, including removing the gas heater from the lounge room. They didn’t remove the faux chimney breast (I assume because it may have been partially supporting the hot water system in the roof), instead converting it to an alcove with a passthrough to a wall mounted tv.

When I picked up a television at the end of 2020 I chose a 40″ model and mounted it. This is how it looked for quite some time:

This tv did fail once before due to a failed power board related to the backlight. I opted to have it repaired as I didn’t want to go through the hassle of finding a new tv.

A few weeks ago that hassle finally arrived, the tv failed again, this time the fault was frozen/corrupted picture a few minutes after being turned on. As this was now over 13 years old I reasoned that it was time for a replacement.

This search was the hassled I was expecting.

Due to where I have the tv mounted I didn’t want anything too big, I wanted to keep it within the width of the chimney breast. I also wanted it to be quite thin, keeping it as close to the wall as possible, like the previous tv. Then there was the matter of what “smart” features it had and how annoying those would be. I wanted to continue using Kodi on a Raspberry Pi to watch media, not anything built into the tv.

In the end I got lucky and found a Samsung tv that was 43″ (with narrower bezel so the same outer dimensions as my old 40″) and quite thin (even thinner than my previous tv). It was also from last year so the places that still had stock were selling it with a significant discount.

I wasn’t able to reuse the previous slim wall mount, but that was handled by spending $50 at Bunnings for a simple slim mount. I am quite happy with how close it is mounted to the wall, even after using spacers so that cables could run past the bracket:

When I first turned the tv on I was stunned at how bad the included remote control was. It is a horrible mess of a few unlabelled buttons that might be touch sensitive, or they might just not work consistently. Then I realized something, my old tv was a Samsung and this new one is also Samsung… so for most functionality the remote from my old tv was significantly easier to use. This also meant I did not have to completely reprogram my universal remote, only update the inputs used for the different activities.

While this tv does have wifi, it also has wired ethernet. Initially I did connect it to the network so it could run updates, but I didn’t sign in to any services and I then unplugged it. This gave an unexpected improvement in regard to free to air broadcasts and the Freeview service.

If you turn the tv on and switch to the DTV input you can watch broadcast tv, changing channels is quick and the overlay is in the Samsung style. But then after about a minute or so (if connected to the network) the interface will swtich and now when you change channels it is showing Freeview branding and it takes about 10 seconds per channel. You can also bring up two versions of the tv guide and the interface is a general mess. I rarely watch broadcast tv that often, but when I do I want the basic functionality that works…

Tagged with: house, television