I find Sony TVs to be pretty quick. I use it them in conjunction with Apple TV, and I never have to deal with the TV itself, and it is quick to turn itself off and on via HDMI CEC.

They are not the high end models either, I have a $630 one from 2016 and a $600 one from 2020.

My Roku-built-in TV is usable in maybe 3-4 seconds—when it's in sleep mode. A cold boot (say, if it's lost power for any reason) does take tens of seconds.

Meanwhile, my dumb LCD TV from ~2008 only does cold boots and comes up in maybe 2 seconds, no matter what.

I assume Roku does not have the sufficient resources to properly equip their products with the necessary hardware to cope with their software, resulting in a compromised product that manifests as slow start times.

Unfortunately, I do not see how some of these smaller players can come close to being competitive with the big players seeing how small the profit margins are on physical devices.

Unless they have a reputation for very high quality, I assume there are lots of compromises being made on the hardware side to be able to compete on price.

> I assume Roku does not have the sufficient resources to properly equip their products with the necessary hardware to cope with their software, resulting in a compromised product that manifests as slow start times.

I dunno—this TCL Roku TV's the best-performing smart TV I've used, including some very expensive ones. It's really fast except for cold boots (again: these only happen if the power's actually been interrupted, or, rarely, on updates). Roku's OS helps, since it's way less resource-hungry than, say, Android-derived operating systems. I've done some work with Roku devices so I've used lots of them, and even the very low-end ones have always performed really well. The OS is weird, but you can't say it's not (relatively) resource efficient and responsive.

... I do have a much-worse brand of Roku TV that is badly under-powered. It sucks. It's the brand that replaced TCL at our local Costco—Hisense, it's called. Looks almost the same, costs almost the same, but is terrible. Fine if you treat it as a dumb panel and just use stuff plugged in to it, but terrible if you intend to use the built-in Roku OS for anything other than switching inputs. Frequent (apparent) out-of-memory crashes, many less-well-made (but major) streaming "apps" are laggy, and so on.

Its not just Roku. Every single TV sold is like this from every single manufacturer. They are all slower and shittier at being a TV screen than my 720p screen from like 2005. What's with that? It's like a giant cabal of an entire industry deciding that their customers aren't worth the hardware, no matter of its some Walmart only entry level TV or the top of the line thousands of dollars screen from a major brand. The only way to get a competent TV is to not even buy retail, but buy the same exact panels without the dumb hardware from the commercial market.

I am sure there are plenty of qualified people doing the necessary due diligence to figure out which features, or perception of features, customers are willing to pay for.

I doubt the executives at Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Hisense, etc are sitting there and consciously choosing to keep people away from fast, dumb TVs for the hell of it. It is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins, no one is obviously making much money, so after all these years, I would surmise they are making decisions that allow them to stay in business after all these years.

Personally, I am biased towards Sony, and I am happy with the speed of the two consumer line TVs I have purchased. However, I only use them in conjunction with Apple TV, so I have no idea with changing channels or inputs or any of that is like.

You would think that somewhere in the market there is a price point that means you get more powerful hardware in the TV. It really seems like the TVs at the entry level have the exact same hardware as TVs that cost 5 times as much or more. Surely that markup should afford hardware that is slightly faster and still produce a profit margin. If people are willing to pay 5x more for a panel their eyes can barely percieve the differences in, surely they'd be happier with a smoother UX experience compared to a competitors offering.

>surely they'd be happier with a smoother UX experience compared to a competitors offering.

Apparently not? That's my point, that these large TV manufacturers must have enough insight to know if something simple like that would be economical.

> I doubt the executives at Sony, Samsung, LG, Vizio, Hisense, etc are sitting there and consciously choosing to keep people away from fast, dumb TVs for the hell of it. It is a cutthroat business with razor thin margins, no one is obviously making much money, so after all these years, I would surmise they are making decisions that allow them to stay in business after all these years.

Again, at least part of why this is happening is they can't sell ads and spyware-data with dumb TVs. Features that consumers want may be a factor, but I can guarantee you (as in: I've had some actual insight into the industry) that a big reason is that they can monetize their customers' data and eyeballs with smart TVs, and so undercut any competitors who choose not to do that. Price matters a lot to TV buyers, so this is effective at driving sales (and so, keeping your product on store shelves, and avoiding a product death-spiral).

Nothing like a good race to the bottom to ruin an entire industry

I have a Samsung and it’s slow but not that slow. It’s a 2014 I think and I probably get picture (DVB-T) in around 10 seconds.

I have Sony and Samsung "smart" TVs that aren't connected to the internet. Both turn on almost instantly.