Originally Posted by
gale
I thought with a smart tv you didn't need a laptop. I can hook a computer up to my dumb tv-it has an HDMI port on it. I thought the whole draw of a smart tv is that it's like a computer and tv in one.
That's true. However, a smart tv is not quite as smart as a laptop. We are subscribed to a series of business lectures from a private company, and these are not offered via any "channel" such as Netflix, Amazon, or ....... We really want to be able to watch these lectures on the tv in the living room instead of being chained to our computer desks. That's why we ended up going the laptop route. It also makes tasks such as creating a spreadsheet possible. Basically we can use this big tv screen as a computer monitor for any computerized task we want to do.
When we went in initially, dh was thinking in terms of a smart tv with its own built-in web browser. However, those types of built-in tv browsers have idiosyncrasies. "Smartness" varies from tv to tv. Not everyone wants full computer adaptability like we do, but we figured it gives us the most features and makes us a little more obsolete-proof for future applications.
We also like being able to use a *keyboard* to stream information to the tv. The built-in web browsers for smart tv's typically have you using a remote to scroll through information to get where you want to go. Our blu-ray DVD player has apps for Netflix, etc. but it is a real pain to scroll through to find what we want; a keyboard is faster.
By plugging in the laptop, we really didn't need to get a smart tv. You're right; you can do the same thing with a dumb tv as long as it has an HDMI outlet. My dh happened to be in the room, so I asked him why we didn't get a dumb tv. He said that only the lower quality tvs sold now are dumb. All of the better quality tvs (ones with better picture) automatically come with some level of "smart"; they also now all come "3D ready". These features are just automatically built-in whether you use them or not.
Picture quality may not matter as much to many people. Our tv's tend to last at least 20 years and we are both past retirement age. I wanted to get the very best picture possible since we will likely be using the tv for several hours every day for the next 20 years.
There are so many variables. For example, it's fine to get a dumb tv and plug in a laptop to it as we are doing. However, you need to be sure the laptop has a graphics chip. If graphics are run through the CPU, you will get buffering problems and the whole process will be slowed down. (This is true whether the tv is smart or not.)