Samsung announces M8 smart monitor series

https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-announces-m8-the-new-and-stylish-smart-monitor-series

by car_analogy • 4 years ago

18 63 4 years ago

news.samsung.com

Smart TV spying on you? Don't worry, buy a monitor instead. It will spy on you, too.

That is my worry as well. For now, there are still dumb monitors on the market, but I fear the story with smart TVs will repeat itself.

amelius• 4 years ago

Extra fun:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HEC

HDMI Ethernet Channel technology consolidates video, audio, and data streams into a single HDMI cable, and the HEC feature enables IP-based applications over HDMI and provides a bidirectional Ethernet communication at 100 Mbit/s.

Nextgrid2• 4 years ago

This would require the other HDMI device to be complicit and act as a switch/router. I have yet to see any device supporting this technology at all.

UberFly2• 4 years ago

They don't really want to see what goes on in front of monitors.

mikece• 4 years ago

"Smart" in this sense should be understood as being akin to the archaic term that one is a "smart dresser" -- it's all about style, not about electronic engineering achievements that are leaving anyone in the dust.

zamadatix• 4 years ago

Why should it be understood as the archaic usage?

peakaboo• 4 years ago

Yes we know. :)

nightski• 4 years ago

I think it has more to do with the fact that they have touches like the magnetic camera and IoT hub built in (their IoT tech is SmartThings). But I could be wrong.

jfk13• 4 years ago

Sounds like there's more than just an IoT hub built in:

"... the M8 also allows users to enjoy a variety of OTT services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Apple TV via Wi-Fi without having to connect to a PC or TV"

That's a monitor with extensive plans for communicating with the world...

spicybright• 4 years ago

I know mac wasn't the first to come up with this sort of monitor shape, but this looks like a lot of them I've used in the past.

Not that it's a bad thing, just an observation.

Someone1234• 4 years ago

I'd strongly recommend against. I have a fairly recent Samsung "smart" TV, and it is a software dumpster fire with unremovable ads everywhere.

If you want a good smart app experience I'd stick to external dedicated device that you can swap out if they get annoying/bad (e.g. Roku, Apple TV, Fire Stick, Google TV, et al.).

In general though Samsung has really lost its luster. They used to be a brand I'd gravitate towards for a fair balance of price Vs. features, but the quality has gone down and prices up. VIZIO are now the "cheap and cheerful" brand, with maybe LG (non-smart) being the premium brand.

SkyPuncher• 4 years ago

I have a 5 year old Samsung "smart" TV who's "smart" features are basically unusable. It can take nearly 10 seconds for the "home" screen to pop up. This home screen is core to switching inputs, apps, and settings.

It worked just fine 5 years ago. Now, without having done anything, it's slow as heck.

adolph• 4 years ago

Have you performed any network traffic analysis? Maybe it attempts to phone home to Samsung or Ciansa and waits for a bunch of timeouts to dead endpoints before continuing.

epicide• 4 years ago

I recently got rid of a Samsung "smart" TV that I only had for a few years.

It felt as though the UI were intentionally designed to be hostile. Even changing the inputs was not as simple as selecting an HDMI port. The TV had to determine what was connected to it so that it could show a cute icon for it. It also applied preset picture settings for the device, which were often horrible.

After digging through the absolutely nonsensical menus, you could get the picture to look alright. I often had to turn off various enhancers and game modes to make it look remotely reasonable. Too bad it would repeatedly forget the settings every week or so. Even though the display panel itself was quite nice, I had resolved to just having a horrible picture at all times.

I never used the actual connectivity features as I had my own external devices for that. The whole thing was an absolute dumpster fire of a product and it will not be missed. After that, I refuse to even consider any product from Samsung that isn't just a single component in something else (e.g. an SSD). Life is too short.

(and none of this even gets to the various privacy concerns about the company, especially with their TVs)

httpz• 4 years ago

Price of a Roku, Chomecast, etc are pretty trivial compared to a price of a TV. Just get one of those and don't bother with your TVs "smart" features.

Recommending against a certain brand because their smart TV UX is bad doesn't seem like a good advice anymore because you can entirely replace the "smart" experience with a cheap streaming stick and ignore whatever smart features your TV offers. Some streaming sticks these days are pretty integrated so you can control everything you need with just one remote and don't have to bother with the TV's original remote anymore.

kitsunesoba2• 4 years ago

I have a hard time seeing the appeal in a monitor that isn’t just a display with some integrated peripherals. If I plug it in, it needs to present a picture and connect its webcam and speakers as if they were external and that should be the end of it.

Doing something like Apple is with the Studio Display would probably be ok, but if anything resembling an OS is being surfaced to the user (as Tizen is with these) or the device needs its own wifi connection, something has gone wrong somewhere.

In fact, going the opposite direction I’ve been intently watching BFGDs (big format gaming displays) as a potential source of true dumb TVs with specs that don’t suck.

ncmncm• 4 years ago

Anything with Tizen will be a guaranteed dumpster fire of bugs.

I didn't notice mention of Tizen in the blurb, thanks for catching that.

dclaw• 4 years ago

Don't worry, now your monitor can be employed in an iot botnet too!

cyberlurker• 4 years ago

Hard pass. Anything “smart” from Samsung is a nightmare for security and usability after the first year.

john_moscow• 4 years ago

Curious, does something change after the first year/warranty runs out? I've bought one from Costco, never connected it to Internet and am using it as a big HDMI display. Aside from the brief prompt to accept the privacy policy when you turn it on, it works just fine. Is it going to change after the first year?

genidoi• 4 years ago

I’m at the point where I see “smart” in a hardware product title and automatically infer “this product comes with prolonged, additional pain, tactfully facilitated by 4th rate usability design, rock bottom grade WiFi hardware, ad bombardment for no discernible reason and never ending “please subscribe” onslaught to whatever new partnership that corporate negotiated this month.

Dumb TV is unambiguously a selling point now.

wlesieutre• 4 years ago

It won't have all the ads when you buy it, they'll be put in later once they hit mass market and have your money.

https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...

achow2• 4 years ago

Recently bought a Samsung Smart TV for my aged mother.

It was life changing for her.

She watches YouTube mainly; she selects videos of her interest areas using voice (button less remote with Mic). Mainly watches exotic and local travel destinations. Things she has heard of, but never had a chance to go. She particularly likes the intimate, off the beaten track, short solo traveler's videos.

She feels liberated, as she says she is traveling without the need to leave the house (which she cannot due to her age and mobility issues).

Without smart TV this would not have been possible.

drcongo3• 4 years ago

You could have spent 1/20th of the cost on an Apple TV or even a Firestick and she'd have got exactly the same.

Edit: And with an Apple TV it would also not be spying on her 24/7 and sending audio recordings of her private conversations back to Samsung.

belval2• 4 years ago

You seem to be reposting variations of that same comment, not sure what's up with that.

Now to address your point, thinking of the elderly is great, usability is a good point. That being said, Samsung's is absolute garbage designed to boost their advertising business. You can get the same voice-based interface on most Android TVs.

gautamcgoel• 4 years ago

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. Yes, we all agree that smart tvs are shipped with adware and tracking. That matters a lot to the HN crowd, but a lot less to typical consumers. This commenter found something which works well for his family and makes them happier than they would be otherwise. Why downvote that?

ASalazarMX2• 4 years ago

Facebook has been a blessing for my aging (74) mother, who went from fearing computers to using a tablet and a smartphone to keep in touch with distant relatives. As technophiles we tend to forget how much value these modern curses bring to non-tech people.

ASalazarMX2• 4 years ago

Computer monitors are the last bastion of dumb screens, at most they did some post-processing and that was it. I'd certainly never buy this smart TV in disguise.

UberFly2• 4 years ago

Can we even buy dumb TVs anymore? I just would never connect "smart tvs" to the internet anyway, but would love to not have all that crap in the menus and such.

otikik• 4 years ago

I have a Samsung “smart” tv as well. I am reasonably tech-savvy. Nowhere in that thing’s box said that it would show me ads in the menu. But it did. I would replace it by a different tv, but honestly no one in the family watches tv any more.

casenjo• 4 years ago

Thank you but no thank you. As it receives OS/app updates it'll inevitably lead to the monitor slowing down to do a basic function like displaying the image coming from the computer. This "smartifying" of everything is getting very frustrating, it happened to TVs and now monitors are next.

bXVsbGVy• 4 years ago

Additionally, the microphone uses an Always On Voice function, displaying conversation information on screen when Bixby is activated, even if the monitor screen is turned off.

What world we live in for this to be an acceptable selling point?

belval2• 4 years ago

Marketing 101, make the buyer think that defects are features.

marcodiego• 4 years ago

Smart monitor? Does it means it is no longer a "dumb monitor"? I've been thinking of buying monitors to escape the smart tv trend.

rock_artist• 4 years ago

I bought the M7 to our office. It was a year ago one of the cheapest 4K 32" displays with USB-C and PD.

Tizen is horrible of course. But some people at our office regret it due to its colours fainted especially with other Samsung, Dell, LG and 5k iMac 27" we've got.

olyjohn• 4 years ago

It's already hooked to a vastly more powerful computer that can do far more than the bullshit they built in. What's the point other than sending screenshots of your computer usage to marketers?

Nextgrid2• 4 years ago

sending screenshots of your computer usage to marketers?

That's exactly the point, and it doesn't even matter whether it does that well (or whether any of that data is valuable), as long as marketers keep believing the illusion that it is.

etempleton• 4 years ago

At one point I have to imagine the Apple Studio Monitor was planned to include Apple TV OS support.

I think this actually fills a niche that is underserved in the tv market. It is hard to find a half way decent tv under 40 inches. The upshot is there are a lot of people using an iPad in their kitchen as tv.

throwaway4good3• 4 years ago

I sense that hn does not like Samsung (for some reason?) but Apple recently introduced a monitor with similar (albeit currently unused) computing power.

Personally I think "smart" monitors is the way to go and we will moving away from devices that require a physical connection to your computing device whether that is a physical computer underneath your desk, your phone or something in the cloud - netflix, a document on microsoft 365 etc.

This space is obviously young so there will be a lot of exploring, fails and hickups.

Also noteworthy is the Huawei Mateview 28" with their project your phone to the screen nfc pad.

jayd162• 4 years ago

Yeah I think it's short sighted to not at least consider what an ideal smart monitor might be. If we're moving to hybrid offices and temporary workstations it might be useful to imagine modern thin terminals in the office space.

tuckerman2• 4 years ago

What’s the advantage of a thin terminal over a dumb monitor with a thunderbolt/usb-c cable to hookup to your laptop? At least personally I feel like In the last 5-6 years laptops have become powerful enough and have sufficient battery life that most companies I know besides Google have dispensed with desktops.

If we did want smart monitors, I think table stakes would be coming up with a great input experience (fumbling around to find a remote or playing with the few buttons on the bottom/back don’t seem ideal) and figuring out how to do peripheral discovery/control better. Today, my Samsung tv sometimes forgets what is plugged into it and goes into a weird “detecting your device” mode for a very long time so that it can try and let me control it via the remote.

car_analogy3• 4 years ago

Yeah I think it's short sighted to not at least consider what an ideal smart monitor might be.

One where the user controls the software, not the other way around. All the misfeatures of smart TVs and monitors are only possible because users are unable to replace the hostile manufacturer-imposed software with something of their choosing.

kitsunesoba2• 4 years ago

I don’t see problems with a monitor “smart” enough to be able to connect to devices wirelessly. That seems fine.

As soon as the thing sprouts a UI and can do things on its own you’ve got problems, though… this means that it has an onboard computer, and probably not a good one — these types of devices tend to have “smarts” on par with those of ancient low-to-midrange Android smartphones from 6+ years ago, because that’s what can be bolted in at almost no extra cost.

That lack of overhead in power means that the device has a short lifespan right out of the box. Web apps continue to get heavier and more resource intensive and will quickly make it inadequate for such basic things as Google Docs. The manufacturer also won’t support it for more than a couple years because nobody wants to take the extra time and energy to write software lean enough to run on old weak hardware.

So if “smart monitors” are to be a success, they’re going to need to do two things:

1. Don’t use such unreasonably cheap and underpowered “smarts”

2. Put the “smarts” on a module or card that can easily be swapped out so when it inevitably gets slow as mud you can upgrade it

Alternatively web app devs could make efficiency more of a priority and manufacturers could continue to provide updates for a decade+, but both of those seem highly unlikely.

tomjen3• 4 years ago

You are right, but I cannot come up with a reason why I would want to have no physical connection to my laptop - atleast not until we get true wireless power. At that point I can see the idea in that I can leave the laptop in my bag and use the keyboard/mouse/screen combo on my desk when at home. That will be convenient.

But true wireless is something people actually want, so of course that is not going to happen.

drcongo3• 4 years ago

Not a chance in hell I'd have one of these in my home. Or any Samsung product for that matter.

ZeroCool2u• 4 years ago

On top of the pains of having a 'smart' monitor that has been thoroughly disparaged throughout the thread, this is just not a great monitor.

At 60 Hz the refresh rate is objectively low. Try 120 Hz or higher and attempt to go back. It's unlikely you'll want to.

It's a VA panel, not IPS or OLED, which are really table stakes for a high quality monitor.

The wireless chipset looks like it's fairly old for a device that is just now being announced. No WiFi 6E or BT 5? Really unfortunate.

I can't find any info on it, but considering ~~the wattage for the USB-C port isn't specified or even any mention of PD this doesn't sound like much of a hub~~. My fault, it does say 65 Watts max, which is enough for some ultra books, but you really want 100 watts to be comprehensive.

It also doesn't have HDMI 2.1, which means even if the panel could, the connection couldn't push the pixels for 4k 120 Hz. Certainly not without chroma subsampling.

Overall, an extremely poor value proposition.

pinum• 4 years ago

Brightness (Typical): 400 nits
HDR: Yes (HDR 10+)
Contrast Ratio: 3,000:1 (Typ.)

Looks like yet another "fake HDR" monitor. Accepts an HDR10 signal, but can't get much brighter than a regular display, and doesn't have any kind of local dimming.

aunty_helen• 4 years ago

I wouldn't trust anything from Samsung with a camera in it.

rektide2• 4 years ago

A lot of against & some for the smarts here... rather than just steam off & insist tv's need to be dumb, I feel like we need a return to what worked, to the pc era.

Sure Windows 3.1 and beyond were rip roaringly popular but there were always other OS options. We never got locked into unseemly paths. Maybe TV just need to embed small x86 computers, to handle the smart side?

Admittedly there's little actual competition in most os arenas. Apple versus either Microsoft or Google. And Microsoft appears to be going evil, with spyware & adware since their install-base is seemingly unshakeable. But hey, the idea of choice might bring some sunlight to disinfect these situations. Do you want a tv that runs ChromeOS, Android, or GoogleTV? Or webOS or Roku or Tizen? Rather than separate sticks I feel like a real/done well smart tv would have modularity. Alas we just dont expect good things from companies & technology in today's world.

car_analogy3• 4 years ago

choice might bring some sunlight to disinfect these situations [..] Rather than separate sticks I feel like a real/done well smart tv would have modularity.

At that point, why not make the hardware itself modular? The monitor acts as a dumb picture display, controlled by an arbitrary device - a PC, a Roku, ChromeOS, whatever the buyer chooses. And we're back at square one.

The reason manufacturers are moving away from this is because the lack of choice and modularity is the whole point. It lets them push misfeatures onto the user, with no recourse.

windex• 4 years ago

No thanks. We have enough smartness from Samsung TVs and their Mobile phones as it is. It's a shame because their HW is value fo rmoney, it's the software that seems to want to waste your time.

Are there any electronics companies that focus on producing "dumb" devices that just work? Tired of ads and telemetry.

Samsung announces M8 smart monitor series

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