Vizio M65-D0

I’ve been rocking a cheap Vizio E-series 1080p TV since Black Friday 2012. I now have a 4K HDR capable nvidia Shield, and I’ve been itching for 4K HDR! When I moved to Seattle 2 years ago to take a job with Amazon Web Services, my old Vizio was damaged. Of course the moving company took no responsibility, because there was no physical damage. But there was clear internal damage resulting in an ugly vertical blue line down the middle of the TV. I held off for 2 years waiting for the right deal. I’d recently been trying to find a TV that didn’t have any useless smart features. Whatever a TV has, it’s going to be worse than my Nvidia Shield, and it’s likely to not get updates after 6-12 months. I finally settled on Vizio’s M65-D0. It’s a 4K 120Hz HDR capable screen at a great price. It has no smart features, except for built in Chromecast - A pretty interesting idea. With the exception of Amazon Video, most streaming services have an Android app with Chromecast support. Regardless, I won’t be using it, as my Nvidia Shield has both Android TV and Chromecast. I thought Vizio including built-in Chromecast was supposed to simplify things…, but I found the onboarding/setup experience to be really bad. It’s confusing, slow, and fails a lot. I finally set up everything, and started the required firmware update (over WiFi), but it failed. I tried again, then tried with ethernet, and then with flash drive, but it continued to fail. My TV actually was launched without HDR - HDR was enabled in a follow-on firmware update - so the firmware update is absolutely necessary.

I called Vizio support, and they were baffled. They’re sending me a new TV. The cost of bad QA can be high.