Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks
Every time this comes up I feel obligated to add the following:<p>1) Samsung televisions spy on your <i>mercilessly</i>. They collect everything they can, <i>including screenshots</i> at regular intervals and send them back to Samsung so that they can sell this to "partners". They are <i>not</i> a FAANG and don't have anywhere near their level of security expertise. I have second-hand but reliable information about their security approach, and "laughable" doesn't begin to describe it. Assume that whatever you watch on a Samsung TV is being relayed to multiple state-level spy agencies.<p>Ref: <a href="https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-ad-retargeting/" rel="nofollow">https://www.samsung.com/us/business/samsungads/resources/tv-...</a><p>2) Even if you buy a flagship Samsung television for five figures, it's virtually guaranteed that within a year or two they will release an update the slows it down to molasses. These things have controller boards with miniscule amounts of RAM in them, and they use the same firmware across all models. When a new model with more RAM is released, they add more features, causing all older models that self update to start swapping to the pagefile. I've seen several Samsung televisions across several model years and price points get slowed down until response times are up to 2 seconds for most actions. This is "unusable garbage" quality, for crazy money.<p>NEVER buy a Samsung television, ever. You're treated as the product, not the customer, <i>despite</i> paying them a lot of money.<p>PS: This isn't even the only display calibration cheating that they do! Practically all Samsung models use a "shop mode" that cranks up brightness to 11 and oversaturates the colours. Even in "normal" mode Samsung televisions have forced "enhancements" that <i>can't be turned off</i>. There is no "calibrated mode", because it would look like trash on these over-priced televisions.