I discovered that with TVs and privacy, it is possible to have your cake and eat it too.

Smart TVs are actually cheaper --- which make no sense until you realize they are counting on recurring revenue from privacy invasion. They try to strong arm you into connecting the TV to the internet --- unless you run the TV in store demo mode.

Also, the picture quality on lower ends models differ from the more expensive ones primarily because their bightness, contrast and color saturation controls are artificially limited --- except when run in store demo mode.

So my solution is to buy a low end smart TV and run it in demo/store mode without connecting it to the internet. Whereupon, it it will act just like a dumb TV with the brightness and contrast jacked up to simulate the more expensive models.