Just about everything is more expensive these days.
Except TVs. What's the deal with that?
Modern TVs are bigger, look better,
and are more capable than ever before, just like me.
Inside, everyone is a full-blown computer,
complete with its own app store. They even have games and stuff.
So how are they cheaper than ever?
Well, let me tell you. Because TV companies don't sell TVs anymore.
What do I mean by that? Story time.
Before being acquired by Walmart for $2.3 billion in late 2024,
TV manufacturer, Vizio, posted some very interesting quarterly results.
See, Vizio lost money selling TVs,
and yet they were able to make $109 million in profits.
How? Well, it was all thanks to their platform-plus
advertising platform. And if you need any more evidence
that televisions are now ad-o-visions, look at this.
Vizio makes not one mention here of electronics manufacturing.
Then to really drive the point home, Walmart's press release announcing the deal
boasts about how this new acquisition will enhance our advertising capabilities.
And it's not just Vizio. TCL, Samsung, LG, name a major TV brand,
and they have found that the real way to make money is to take your data and serve you targeted advertisements
via their smart operating systems, though. I think we can all agree that the word smart
doesn't really describe the current state of Tizen OS.
And that's why in spite of all the recent enhancements,
consumers now find themselves yearning for the days when turning on their TV just brought them
directly to the content, instead of to an ad-infested home screen.
Seriously, it's the whole thing!
This is also Disney Plus, so is this.
It had 80% ads. So what options are there for folks who just want to display?
As it turns out, not many outside of commercial displays
that, as you'd expect, cost a lot more.
But there is one. After some digging, we found that there is still a company
proudly making, untainted, pure display-only TVs.
Adam, bring it in! It's Scepter, the budget monitor guys.
But this ain't no monitor guys. It's a 75-inch TV that they promised delivers resolution
at its finest. And we're gonna see what you get and what it's like to use
right after we use this segue to our sponsor.
Right under the gate, this is exceeding my expectations. I did not think that some random Scepter TV
would have HDR support. Did you notice that it also has 4K support?
It is true 4K resolution, true 4K input, ultra HD upscaling.
It's also a 4K UHD series. Okay, so it doesn't have a lot going for it.
But that's exactly what's going for it. Exactly!
I wouldn't mind if it gave me a little more detail. We talk in HDR 10, there'll be vision,
but hey, audio return channel. Well, wait, there's more.
It also says here that it supports 4K.
All right, all right, we get the bit. We get three HDMI ports.
We get a USB port, HDMI 2.0 and HDCP 2.2,
and a one-year limited warranty. Wait, Adam, we haven't showed the people the best part.
Turn it around. It won an award.
The Cinema Award. The Scepter Cinema. Absolute Scepter Cinema.
In all seriousness though, how much did we pay for this thing? About $800, which for 75 inches is a pretty good price.
Yeah, memes aside, I'm genuinely excited to see it.
Good packaging, all things considered. They probably can't afford the RMAs.
Still, that's one of the first things you see companies cheap out on, but they've got an extremely rigid screen protector on here.
There's almost like some nice soft styrofoam for the screen as well.
Though, some hard foam for structural integrity. Yeah, this is not great, but probably adequate.
That is, that is one of the remotes. That's an old school remote.
I like this picture of the batteries. Yeah, this is the most Timu brand remote I've ever seen.
Along with the most Timu screwdriver.
Can I interest you in a bagged TV?
Oh, you know, I would love that.
I don't know if I trust it though. Two persons required to prevent injury.
Lift this display with both hands. I don't know if I've ever seen a bag
with lift handles for a TV before. Me neither.
Let's see if it's actually good.
Whoa. It's stretching a little. Yeah. It feels a little scary.
But it did the trick. It's a heavy TV.
Where's the stand?
It must be in the top foam in there.
That's the stand. Oh, those are dinky.
The whole lift bag concept might have been more useful if it actually lifted it somewhere
where we could put the feet on it. It's just, yeah.
That's fine, I got an idea. Yeah.
It's nice because unlike all of the stupid skinny OLEDs,
there's structural integrity to this panel. That's one way of saying that it's really thick.
Yeah. Really, you're gonna use that when we have so much better screwdrivers on LTT Store.com.
I want the true scepter experience, okay? Oh, this does suck though.
Do we have a screw, do you have a screwdriver? Yeah, I do. I can hold it, yeah.
Okay, give me a sec. Hopefully the TV is better than the screwdriver.
On the subject of things that are better, we've got a great look at the IO while we're up here
and this kind of rocks. You got your three HDMIs,
all that do 4K 60 Hertz, one with arc. You got your coax, USB.
And then unlike many modern TVs, we've actually got component in, composite,
as well as optical audio and a headphone jack.
Pretty much everything you need. What, it's a good, you got the headphone jack.
You know, my grandpa uses it for his assisted audio headphones.
And note the absence of an Ethernet port. But again, that's a feature, not a bug.
What are you doing? Well, everything else about this thing has been pretty good so far,
but I noticed that the power cord appears to be hardwired.
And so I was seeing if maybe behind this little cover, there's a better situation, there's not.
What's nice is this is giving me a look at the internals.
If you had any hopes that it was so thick because it had full array local dimming, for instance,
you can put those to rest. You know what I wasn't worried, it's all Phillips.
I mean, yeah, that's unrelated, but good. No, but it seems like you could just take apart
this TV yourself if you want. And put full array local dimming on it yourself.
Oh dude. No. No, you don't want to upgrade the Scepter TV?
Okay, all right. Worlds, listen, write in the comments if you want to see the world's best dumb TV mod.
We got the energy guide on here, but also it's for the N75.
Oh. But I thought that this was the U75.
Here we go. One, two, three. Hoop.
Oh, you went the other way. Oh, I thought I said this.
I'm sorry. Oh, okay, we're ready. I see, I see, I see, I see, I see.
We're ready, we're ready, we're ready. Okay.
When you've been working together as long as me and Adam, you still have no idea what each other are talking about,
but it's funny. Oh wow, there's so many peels.
I'm just failing. Hey.
You don't mind my warning? Wow.
It's big and reflective, wow. It's very reflective, but quite flat.
Yeah, you get some, you get some like, some wiggles there. Yeah, a little bit at the top.
Me and every, every time I kill you. Huge moment.
Sorry, I just looked at the remote just now. How could they?
How could they? F Adele? We love Adele.
She is a generational talent. Why would they put that on the remote?
It says F Adele. They need that. No, love Adele.
Did you have to wear a white shirt today?
I can see you so. Whatever, beige boy, okay.
Hey, at least we both have matching tubes from LTTstore.com.
We did not coordinate this today. It just happened. I got so confused for a second.
Yeah. Cause I was like, oh, hold on.
How do I get to select the right input? So I'm on my shield instead of.
It just went.
Actually, it was crazy. Turn it off again.
Content. That was so quick. That is the fastest I've gone from,
I'd like to watch content to watching content in years.
Yeah, it's like, you don't really realize it. You've gotten so used to like the delay
of waiting for your TV to boot. Okay, so what is in the menu?
Okay, picture. Picture settings.
Okay, that's pretty basic. What is mild picture mode?
I don't know. What I like about it though, is you can see what it's changing.
Yeah, this is actually a great interface. It's like, what does game mean?
It means we crank the brightness and the sharpness a little bit
and we crank the backlight and the contrast is up compared to user.
And it's crazy cause the smart TVs could have setting menus like this. There's no reason that they don't have settings like this.
They choose not to. They choose to have you configure everything
and then you change inputs and you have to configure it all again.
And so when we're not looking at our content,
we just get nothing. You get eye piercing blue.
CEC control on, let's go.
This is probably the simplest CEC interface
that I have ever seen. And I'm comparing to devices that in some cases cost 10 times as much.
I blew a bunch of money on that stupid AV receiver for my home theater
and it has caused me nothing but grief with CEC.
That was it.
Now, I never need to touch the Temu remote again because theoretically hit the power on the shield.
Oh. Oh, wait. No, no, no.
Turn the shield back on because the shield has its own CEC settings.
There we go. There we go. Got to reboot. So that was the problem.
Coming back to our CEC issue, we didn't have it enabled on the shield,
which to me means that from now on, we really shouldn't need this again.
Now the thing about it, usually I avoid doing any sleep features on a TV
because of how annoying the power on cycle is and how long it takes and how confusing it gets.
This thing is actually just gonna work. Well, maybe. Okay, I've got it configured now.
Big moment. Power's off and we power on the shield.
TV's on already. You can see it. Oh my gosh. That's awesome.
You might not like the NVIDIA shield. There's other TV boxes.
Plug it into your computer. But that's the beauty of this, is that you can use whatever thing you want on it
and it doesn't get in your way. I never need to look at this ever again.
This is the one remote I need. So convenient. Kind of wish I hadn't thrown it at the floor.
Like the batteries all came out and everything. And it's like underneath the shelf now.
Okay, but we really need to fire up some content and see if this thing is even worth having.
Also, I wanted to know if HDR was working because realistically, this is not
full array local dimming backlight. So it's gonna be kind of hard to tell.
It's as simple as pressing the info button. Oh my gosh.
How does every TV not have that? Right there. Just tell me what mode you're operating in.
Right there. 24 Hertz. That's amazing. That's exactly what it's supposed to be
for this content right now. Oh yeah, you wanna hear it?
Oh yeah. The volume is the Scepter logo.
That's pretty cute. Speakers are bad.
Hold on, hold on. You don't know that yet. We haven't heard Crab Rave yet.
I know, I know, I know. That didn't happen, that didn't happen. Okay, here we go. 408 million views, 8 million of them are ours.
There's supposed to be a...
Okay, the speakers are bad. In their defense, that's true of most TVs.
Yeah. And in their defense, the TVs that that's not true of
are so expensive that you should probably be getting off-board speakers anyway.
Yep. But image quality. Let's fire up some content.
And a perfect piece of content to evaluate it would obviously be the most perfect piece of content
of all time. The Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad.
It is very dim. It is not a bright display by any means.
No, no it's not. However, in fairness, we have a big light over top of it.
Yep. And it's also not bad.
I mean, this is a dim scene. Let's go to a not dim scene.
Does that look like a matte painted behind them? It's still definitely doing a bit of weird sharpening
that is kind of mucking with the film grain. Oh yeah, I think if we just completely lose any sharpening
that this TV is attempting to do, we end up with a way more natural image.
Those clouds are incredibly blue. It's a pretty solid blue tint to the display in general.
There's like loss of details on the colors of like Skyler's shirt here.
Yeah. But like it gets the job done.
I think there's a little bit too much magenta and house skin tone there out in the desert.
But these are the kinds of things that only display dorks.
People who review technology for a living are likely to notice or especially care about.
Speaking of people who review technology for a living, Labs tested this display.
Oh, did they? Yes. How'd that go?
Not great. When it comes to the lab results, it's pretty not good.
The TV, not super bright, peak brightness of around 361 nits.
In SDR, Delta Ease, not so bad. In HDR, they are literally off the chart.
You cannot see how bad the bars go on every single color.
It is not even close. In terms of coverage, it also doesn't do very good,
but it does what is promised on the manufacturer website. So they didn't lie.
Cool. That's pretty much all. Did they do any motion performance? Motion performance, let me see.
And it's awful. And that's input leg. And that's even ignoring the fact that the pixel transition
response time is also horrible, which normally I can't tell
in just regular content. It's the kind of thing that normally I'd need to play games to notice.
But I don't even need them. Yeah, you can see it a lot when you're using interfaces.
Also, the other thing is that even at $800,
there's not a lot of TVs that are 75 inches at that price
unless you're buying stuff that's deeply discounted. It's kind of a no-man's land.
And I was blown away that they even made a 75-inch TV. But it's nice.
You get to avoid all of the ad tracking. You get to avoid stuff like automatic content recognition
where they take a scan of what's on your screen and compare it to a database.
All that weird stuff. It's literally not sophisticated enough to do that.
And it won't slow down, right? Like, think about how sluggish older smart TVs are now,
because they care so little about the user experience
for an operating system, because they kind of want you to upgrade.
It's worth noting that this model specifically is kind of on its way out, but they have a new 75-inch model
that is coming in. We'll have that link down below. Yeah. So in conclusion, it's a pretty bad TV.
But they're also not charging a lot of money for it. And it comes with benefits that I think
could be well worth the trade-offs for people who value privacy and simplicity.
Like, watch this. I don't want to watch this TV anymore.
I press one button, it's off. And watch this.
You don't want to watch this YouTube video anymore. I press one button and segue to our sponsor.
Thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed this one, how about you check out the dumbest TV I've seen in a minute.
It's the absolutely massive AWOL Cobb like LED wall.
It's so big, it's dumb.