I’ve worked at a company Samsung ended up buying. Exactly as you describe: humiliating, alienating, and infantilizing. Never ever again. And I won’t buy Samsung anything if I can help it because I saw how the software is made… it’s appalling in quality. No thanks.
After giving up on Nokia and friends complaining about Moto and Pixel, its brothers in stock Android, I switched to Samsung and felt it was a massive improvement. If I'm refusing to buy Chinese brands and iPhone and stuck to models available in India, what are my choices?
If any apps work on the Samsung phone, it's because of the app developers' sweat, tears and cursing when they work around the phone-specific bugs that seem to be different for each model. Even Huawei and Xiaomi are better than that.
Source: I work an audio-related mobile app. The audio engine code is littered with comments that read like "On phone X, Y happens and we do Z to work around it". In about 75% of the cases X is some Samsung model. And before you ask, X is the phone it was discovered on so there's no guarantee that the same issues don't occur on other phones but somehow Samsung is the name that always pops up.
I've not really had issues with the Pixel. This is anecdata, but I've had the 2 and currently have the 4a. My wife has the 5. We've had zero issues with them (except for stuff we did ourselves, like cracking the screens) over the past 4-ish years.
I had the 1. The battery died after 2 years but it had already stopped receiving Android updates at that point. The 4a has been good so far but around here the 4a and 5a had really poor availability.
Yeah I guess I should have added in the caveat that I've never owned a phone in 15 years that has lasted more than 2 years due to some kind of mishap. Usually a broken screen or water damage.
On a side note, My favorite phone I've ever had was an LG Envy 3. It was about the size of the palm of my hand and, closed, had a 1.25" screen and a standard 9-key keypad. It could also flip open to reveal a full qwerty keyboard and a 3" screen with some respectable stereo speakers.
As a data point: Sony, Panasonic, LG, etc… all try to have calibrated TVs that match the director’s intent. As in, the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately. They do cheat a little bit and have a “demo” mode the cranks up the saturation and brightness in store to compensate for the overhead lighting.
Samsung takes that cheating to 11 and there is no way to turn it off. It’s not “store mode”. It’s permanently “enhanced” to the point of absurdity.
>the colours and contrast are defined in the standards, and they strive to show them accurately
Not to defend Samsung, but this isn't such an objectively straightforward task as you make it sound. It's impossible, in the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss. So there's an element of subjectivity and judgement in selecting the algorithm used. In other words, they're all "enhanced", and your complaint is simply that Samsung has poor taste.
Of course this all assumes that the display is doing its own color management. This is exactly what you want with a standalone TV, but for a computer display you really want to just provide the computer with the ICC profile and give it the lowest-level access to the pixel values possible, so that the user can assume control over the rendering intent - for that you'd want some kind of "direct mode". It's quite right to criticize Samsung if they do not offer such a mode, but are the other brands any better? The trend for TVs seems to lead away from being good general purpose displays, and towards being standalone devices.
> the general case, to convert colors from one colorspace to another without information loss.
Even in the general case that's not true for new televisions: These typically convert from a smaller space to a large one, which can be done 100% losslessly and accurately as intended.
This is quite common, because as TV panel capabilities have largely outstripped the distribution and encoding standards. For example, Rec.709 (the HD standard) is smaller than what any modern 4K TV can display.
The 4K Rec.2020 standard is huge, but it only exceeds typical panel capabilities along the green axis. This may seem like conversion would be lossy, but if you look carefully at video metadata, it ofen specifies that the "content gamut" is smaller. That is, most modern 4K HDR content is mastered on a display that "merely" has a gamut like Display P3, so that's all you need to reproduce it 1:1.
None of this is done by Samsung. They always stretch colours up to the maximum capability of the panel. These days, that's very close to the full Rec.2020 gamut and looks downright garish. Even if "AI enhanced" or whatever, it's wrong. Colours are distorted and nowhere near the original intent.
If the feature is there, it's better hidden than others. Some time ago when I was shopping for a TV, it looked like every brand's demo mode hurt my eyes (Samsung was the worst but not only one). On Sony I was able to find the "Cinema Pro" mode that looks quite nice under a minute. And no, I couldn't figure out how to disable microphone or SambaTV so the Sony will never be connected to Internet.
