If you are open to projectors they still make “home cinema” projectors that don’t have any smart features or connect to the internet.
I have a BenQ (710tki iirc) that is like this and I believe it meets all your stated requirements (size, resolution, etc). I’ve been very happy with it.
We use a secondhand university projector and a pull-down projection screen.
It's not great for daytime viewing and there's some friction setting it up, but we appreciate that. It's a dedicated movie-night appliance, not something we have on in the background all the time.
How well do modern projectors which cost comparable to consumer TVs do when the room may get indirect sun through windows? This is my one fear that would hold me back from serious projector consideration.
With my 3200 lumen projector it is good at all times of day in my living room projecting on a wall that doesn't get direct sunlight shining onto it. It just can't make anything darker than the wall itself, so blacks are gray, which is not really an issue for me, although it might be if I were watching more movies during the day.
Previously, I had a portable project that only advertised 1000 lumens, and it was difficult to use during the day.
I would say that with a powerful enough projector it isn't really an issue unless you care a lot about black levels during the day.
It's honestly fine, but it does depend on your tolerance for washed out blacks. I have a 1300 lumen projector, stretched to just about its max size (120") and for me it's alright watching in the day. Then it gets even better as it grows darker. As I said, the main issue is that the dark colors are a bit more washed out
This is what I landed on as well - projector connected to an Apple TV. It cost a bit more, and there’s some extra setup, but the results are excellent.
The main issue switching to a projector is figuring out where you are going to position it (different projectors have different throw distances).
More money and more setup, but very worthwhile in the end IMO.
I wish the article covered what is actually in the waiver, but I can hazard a pretty good guess.
The current rules that SAG-AFTRA negotiated with the studios already allow the studios to use AI for "fix it in post" type stuff that doesn't alter an actor's performance, such as extending a scene or modifying the environment around an actor.
If they want to use AI to modify an actor's performance or generate new footage of an actor (the so-called "digital replica") they need to get the actor's consent in advance and compensate them based on the number of days the actor would have worked to produce the generated footage.
Unfortunately I couldn't find anything to confirm this, but it seems likely that Amazon is asking actors for a blanket waiver so they can use AI however they want. If that is the case it is understandable why Cage wouldn't want to work with them.
- Whatever Matthew McConaughey did to protect himself legally against AI-generated use of his likeness
- Whatever Michael Jackson's and Tupac's estates did to handle postmortem work. (Namely, MJ's album Xscape and Tupac's 2012 Coachella hologram).
- Whatever legal and economic shackles were placed on Britney Spears during her conservatorship.
- Terms of "360 deals" in the record industry.
- How SAG-AFTRA handled the introduction of CGI. Tl;dr: there's a distinction between "active performance capture" (e.g. live motion capture) vs. "passive capture" (e.g. photogrammetry scan of a face + CGI to animate it).
On another note: I remember watching BTS for National Treasure (where the treasure room scene in particular was somewhat new technology to be able to render that many reflective objects in one scene through CG alone). I know that Nicolas Cage has also done several CG-heavy films since then. Also, Nicolas Cage is a Coppola.
Overall, I imagine that the man has had enough exposure to the fiddly details of film contracts to know the difference between "the introduction of a new technology" vs. "somebody trying to screw him over".
And my 2c is that it sounds like the studio tried to screw him over.
Yeah. I think if the text is written for other machines, then by all means have an LLM generate it, but if it is intended for a human audience, have a human being write it.
We are still much better at writing in a way that doesn't waste other people's time.
I have a JetKVM and could never get video to work on it despite spending a lot of time on troubleshooting. It may have just been a defective unit but I never got around to trying to RMA it.
Purely an aside but I went to the StandardNotes website and the first thing that struck me was how all over the place their AI generated product images were.
> Lock-in is the game. Users will pay. Many companies under-price their product and suffer the consequences.
Well, just yesterday the WSJ published an article [1] about bending spoons that include this detail:
> Evernote, a note-taking app acquired in 2023, was among the holdings Bending Spoons profiled in its IPO prospectus. Evernote’s revenue was 30% higher in 2025 than in 2022, and during that time average revenue per monthly active user rose 150%. What the prospectus didn’t say: Those figures meant the number of users fell 48%. Revenue rose through price increases as the customer base shrank.
That's bending spoons' business model. Buy a declining business and drive it into the ground by extracting as much value as they can from the customers still dependent on it.
It's basically the broadcom model for VMware. Sadly this model is very popular these days.
I'm very happy with obsidian these days though I don't use their sync service. The self hosted livesync is pretty good though a bit quirky at times.
A bit over a year ago I got an iPad Pro with the nano-texture display and when hearing that apple was developing a folding phone I thought, man, if they put this screen on the inner display that would be amazing.
I assumed they wouldn't do it because they were marketing the nano-texture as a specialty thing for professionals and glossy screens were the popular ones, but now here we are.
Then they'd be seriously dumb people to buy an otherwise inferior (too thick, too heavy, bad cameras, small screen) device for $2000 to just use that outer screen alone
I have a BenQ (710tki iirc) that is like this and I believe it meets all your stated requirements (size, resolution, etc). I’ve been very happy with it.
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