If you do some research and find a reasonably engineered TV, the inclusion of "smart" functionality doesn't necessarily detract from the device's utility. About

If you do some research and find a reasonably engineered TV, the inclusion of "smart" functionality doesn't necessarily detract from the device's utility. About 5 years ago I bought a 55" 4K TV based purely on its performance as a PC monitor. It happened to be an Android TV. After moving, I stopped using it as a monitor and started using it as a TV. It's been a mostly positive experience. It even received an update within the last year. The update exchanged some old bugs for some new bugs, but for the most part it turns on and streams videos without much fuss. It's the first TV I've owned that correctly sequences my audio receiver's power over HDMI, and successfully passes through the TV remote's playback controls to the blu-ray player. The most frustrating thing about it is that there's apparently a defect in its hardware accelerated video decoder. When Netflix came out with their fancier compression codecs last year, 4k shows started completely glitching out. Folk were complaining about it on reddit for months. Luckily I have a friend who works at Netflix who was able to start busting some skulls and get it patched over. For now... I figure I've got at least another year or two before the built-in Android functionality is obsolete to the point of being inconvenient, or the streaming apps stop coping with the buggy video decoder. Since the TV works pretty well as a monitor, though, I should be able to just hook up a more modern external Android TV device and keep going with a roughly similar experience. I'm hopeful that it will even continue to seamlessly power on and off. My other TV is a "dumb" 1080p Samsung plasma screen I bought second hand in 2010 from a particularly sketchy dude on Craigslist. It's still going strong, other than some occasional power supply buzzing and perhaps a bit of phosphor fade. It's travelled across the country and even survived a bachelor party camping trip. Honestly though, it's more of a pain to use than the Android TV, even as a dumb monitor.