Already one of the World's best-selling TV brands, TCL (The Creative Life) is now one of the fastest growing consumer electronics brands in North America. Founded over 30 years ago, TCL prides itself on delivering more to consumers with high quality products featuring stylish design and the latest t...
Turning Off the Roku Features of Your TCL Smart TV
You have the option to disable the Roku features of your TCL Smart TV...
I would say that having an option to turn that garbage off is actually a point in its favor. They're very cheap TVs and if you don't have to enable the roku spying option then that's a plus in my book.
This is more for people like me who already have one and still need to use it as a monitor, but want to make sure that Roku never collects another bit of data from us.
"A factory reset returns the TV to its original, out-of-the-box state. Performing a factory reset will remove all stored personal data relating to your settings, network connections, Roku data, and menu preferences."
Solely to let the TV's auto configuration and discovery pick it up and customize the inputs automatically. But you're right, it's not actually necessary to power everything on.
The TCL TV I use for my PC monitor has a setting to always boot into an input
I do that and never see the smart features, shit I've never even connected it to the Internet
I just use it as a 42 in. 4k monitor
Edit: I should mention that depending on viewing distance the PPI of a monitor can be quite low before it starts having a noticeable degregation on the viewing experience. At my sitting distance of roughly 30in from the monitor a PPI of 105 (basically what a 42in 4k screen has) is fine as even at that distance individual pixels aren't visible. (45in at 4k is where you start being able to resolve them with 20/20 vision (we get about 1 arc minute of res from our eyes which some ugly math tells us that at a viewing distance of 30in we could determine details at about 100ppi (0.01 inches) in size))
Edit 2 For the really curiously nerdy:
Here's a little chart for max screen sizes for various seating distances based on PPI. The numbers are rounded (and start with a rounded number) and all of them have a FOV around 66 degrees.
Personally I wouldn't go for the max size on any of these and I'd go for a bit lower. Cheaper, dead pixels are harder to see, you may change your viewing distance based on comfort, minimizing screen door effect, etc, etc.