Three months ago (and one week) I returned home from seven weeks in various hospitals to find my brother had reorganised my lounge room furniture. The greatest change was the viewing distance to the TV from the armchair. The distance was about half of what it used to be and the sofa that has been on one of the long sides of the room was now where the old recliner/rocker used to be.
That chair I'd inherited from my late father, in 2002. It was dumped, there's only so much space and I received from storage at my sister's place, the electric assist armchair Mum had used while in the aged care facility for he last 14 months of life. This chair rises to a height and angle sufficient to enable anyone to stand without needing the effort normally associated with standing, something critically necessary as my mobility was greatly impaired, needing a wheeled walker to get around.
The chair was positioned where the sofa used to be. I felt that to be unsatisfactory, so now that I can get about home without walking aids I rearranged the furniture again. The sofa was moved from the end of the room to the long side under a 3.6 metre-wide window. DVD/CD racks from behind the sofa at the end of the room moved between the sofa and a bookcase. An open box-style display/storage unit that had been behind the sofa was moved sideways, leaving just enough room for the electric assist chair to go where the old recliner had been.
The existing 7-year-old 32-in HD TV was now twice as far as it had been for the last three months and I was having trouble seeing text on it when using the Apple TV 4k. I'd been intending to replace the TV with at least a 43-inch 4k unit and started pricing LG-brand units.
Why LG, you ask? Because Google and Samsung. I wanted anything except Samsung's Tizen OS or Google's Google TV/Android TV OS types. This left LG Smart TVs option of webOS, which I've always had something of a soft spot for.
I started pricing units last week and would have bought a 43-inch LG 4k TV had any been available. Alas, as most retailers had that one at about $170 off normal price, there were none available until the 2nd week in August.
Then a few days ago, that low price was discontinued and it was now just under $900 for the 43-inch LG UT8050 4k TV, exactly the same price as the 50-inch version that was in plentiful supply. So yesterday I bought the 50-inch LG UT8050 4k version. Had the box been 5mm longer it would not have fitted in my car in the preferred semi-upright position. Thus I was able to get it home without having to incur an additional delivery fee and delivery time delay.
This thing needed an internet connection to set it up, so i fed it with an available Ethernet cable from the spare port on a Mesh router used as a Wi-Fi range extender. One Ethernet port is used with the 4k Apple TV streaming box as Ethernet is a more stable connection than Wi-Fi in that room. Once it was set up to my satisfaction and had downloaded and installed a software update, I turned off Wi-Fi on the TV and disconnected the Ethernet. Now it's no longer a Smart TV but a Lobotomised one. Any features than need internet are covered without intrusive ads by the Apple TV.
Seven years ago I'd bought the 32-in TV from ALDI and found its speakers to be inadequate at best. Most of the time it used the single 1st generation HomePod attached to the Apple TV for audio. Something went wonky with the audio output when I added a second HomePod as a stereo pair so another ALDI trip was in order to buy a soundbar to use with the TV. Later I sorted out the HomePod stereo pair issue and the soundbar was only used for live TV broadcast viewing without the Apple TV.
The speakers in the new LG TV are excellent and don't need the soundbar. So I disconnected the portable ALDI 19-in HD TV from the bedroom and replaced it with the now unused 32-in TV and soundbar combination. While testing the new TV with the soundbar, I used the Toslink optical connection between the two devices and found it to be quite effective but ultimately unnecessary, because the TV's built-in speakers we perfectly adequate. Other connections for the soundbar include Bluetooth, Composite, Aux or USB. The soundbar with the 32-in TV uses the Aux connection.
I'm very happy with the video and audio quality of the new TV plus the simple 56% increase in the diagonal screen size leads to a viewable area almost 2.5 times greater, very nice for these aging eyes.