Whats your best and worst purchase of 2024

Renegade

Renegade

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Continuing with the "Best of 2024" threads, what is your best and worst purchase of 2024. Could be anything but name only one absolute best/worst.

Ok I am changing my post as I just realized I had bought a XBOX controller for playing games on TV. Its a nice break with some casual games once a fortnight. I had mentioned playing Stradale on the game thread. Will try out some new games soon.

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Dont recall regretting a purchase as I have grown increasing careful of what I buy. I have many regretful purchases in yester years but this thread is for 2024.
 
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although a few more good ones are on their way soon to me before the year ends, but the best (and biggest) for me would be the sony 75X90L TV purchased some months back. had done a LOT of head-banging research for a couple of months prior that before settling on it & moving away from a previous plasma to an LED-LCD instead of an OLED. and did even some post-purchase comparisons to reassure myself & finally say, no regrets!
 
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Kilroyquasar said:
although a few more good ones are on their way soon to me before the year ends, but the best (and biggest) for me would be the sony 75X90L TV purchased some months back. had done a LOT of head-banging research for a couple of months prior that before settling on it & moving away from a previous plasma to an LED-LCD instead of an OLED. and did even some post-purchase comparisons to reassure myself & finally say, no regrets!
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Mine is a similar story. I had an Epson FHD projector in my bedroom for like six years and it was showing its age. I wanted to buy am OLED or miniLED TV close to 100 as my PJ screen is 120 and anything smaller would just not appeal to me. Spent days on researching and comparing but everything was either not releasing in India, too costly or too underwhelming in other specs. Finally, decided to go back to PJs and bought a Benq 4K projector. It's miles better than my old FHD projector and movie-watching at home has become a delight. So yeah, best purchase of the year for me and no regrets.

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Best of 2024:
Poco X6 pro. Having used alot of Samsung, little bit of iPhone and then some of Redmi K50i, i wanted a phone with a good Ppi, fast CPU, decent cameras, as my work demands alot of Lighting calculations, selections on my phone itself. 1st time ever i bought a 512GB phone and now i can't look at anything below. No storage concerns in recording 4k videos. Alot of work-related-media on my phone.
Keeping my k50i along as companion makes me use both phones of HyperOs seamlessly

Worst of 2024:
Changed Mercedes GLA tyres to one tiny bit size-up upon really strong recommendation of a shopkeeper. It resulted in RPM-sensors going bad. So ended up again buying normal size tyres from that dealer (another 4k/5k as my upsize tyres were now 2 days used) and new RPM sensors from Mercedes (32k).
(now i am very cautious not to fall for recommendations of item which a shop has in stock, the person might be offloading dead-stock, rather ordering something post-research for item which is not in stock, is better)
 
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buzz88 said:
Mine is a similar story. I had an Epson FHD projector in my bedroom for like six years and it was showing its age. I wanted to buy am OLED or miniLED TV close to 100 as my PJ screen is 120 and anything smaller would just not appeal to me. Spent days on researching and comparing but everything was either not releasing in India, too costly or too underwhelming in other specs. Finally, decided to go back to PJs and bought a Benq 4K projector. It's miles better than my old FHD projector and movie-watching at home has become a delight. So yeah, best purchase of the year for me and no regrets.

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Which model did you buy?
 
Bought oled monitor, and absolutely love it. Very large jump in image quality vs previous ips screen.
Not at the cheapest price though, i bought it after price drop and price dropped again.

Also happy that i bought air purifier/sensor and a dehumidifier this year. My winter allergy and asthma symptoms are much reduced for the first time.
So i guess this becomes best purchase, and atleast now i know for sure that increased air pollution in winter causes respiratory issues for me.
 
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Tracer_Bullet said:
Bought oled monitor, and absolutely love it. Very large jump in image quality vs previous ips screen.
Not at the cheapest price though, i bought it after price drop and price dropped again.

Also happy that i bought air purifier/sensor and a dehumidifier this year. My winter allergy and asthma symptoms are much reduced for the first time.
So i guess this becomes best purchase, and atleast now i know for sure that increased air pollution in winter causes respiratory issues for me.
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Which air purifier did you buy? I need to buy one since I also suffer from mild Asthma and allergies. Winters amplify the symptoms.
 
PunkX 75 said:
Which air purifier did you buy? I need to buy one since I also suffer from mild Asthma and allergies. Winters amplify the symptoms.
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Ikea starkvind, but it shouldn't matter that much. Its just an air filter and a fan. I bought it because filter cost is reasonable (1k, good size) and i like Ikea. I stocked up on filters just in case.
Clean air delivery rate matters more than HEPA filter %
Make sure it has prefilter and check availability of filters.
Conway seems to have good products too, although they had discontinued a popular one ( 150? Don't remember) when i was looking.

1) PM2.5 sensors help in understanding whats happening. I bought ikea VINDSTYRKA but it may have been discontinued ( cheaper 1k one is not good)
2) Air purifier alone was not enough for me. Also need to vaccum regularly ( atleast once a week) + regularly wash bedsheet/pillow cover/curtains.
3) I try to use surgical mask ( Tata one is good) outside room.
4) Drinking Cold water at night/early morning also triggers asthma for me for some reason. So started using electric kettle.
5) Charcoal filter in AP, from what i read, isn't very useful as it gets used up very quickly.
6) AP with ionizers may not be safe.

Ideally, we need air tight windows and HVAC to maintain air quality in entire house, but for now this will do. I still need to take inhaler once in a week or two now but its much better than every day and haven't had allergy for quite some time.

I also use a dehumidifier ( Sharp DW-J20FM-W ) and run it at night to bring down humidity to 50/60.
It also has an air purifier, so i have 2 now. But i bought it later and not sure about filter price and availability.
This one makes air comfortable, keeps electronics safer and has a safer version of ionizer. I dunno if this helps directly, but it improves air quality a lot in humid Mumbai.
 
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Best: them 200 rupee door-bottom guards/fillers. You know you just slide them in, and Good bye to to them tiny lizards from entering your sweet room. Might even help in cool ac air not leaving the room too not sure though.

Worst: pixel 8. Endured every single day of the 2 months that I had it.
 
Best purchase is Flipper Zero.
Why: Its just a lot of fun playing around with it.
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Worst purchase : EvoFox One. Bought it as I was unable to find my xbox controller in my movers packages.
Why: Pretty bad drift after only a few months of usage. Its just lying there in a box now.

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ronnie_gogs said:
Best purchase is Flipper Zero.
Why: Its just a lot of fun playing around with it.
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This looks too cool, like those portable hacker tools. What all use cases have you tried with it so far and planning to. The most straightforward one being controlling multiple Infra Red devices from it.
 
Renegade said:
This looks too cool, like those portable hacker tools. What all use cases have you tried with it so far and planning to. The most straightforward one being controlling multiple Infra Red devices from it.
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Till now I have used it for copying car key fob, copying rfid cards (copied my gym card), bad usb running ducky scripts, BLE scanning and spam attacks.copied all my remotes and have one device with me for all my remotes.

Currently trying to do wifi penetration testing with the wifi card.

Haven't tried iot devices yet but I want to get smart plugs and sensors and try to use it with them.
Didnt try NFC copying yet
Didnt try UART, I2C and SPI
Didnt try AVR programming
Havent tried iButton
 
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Tracer_Bullet said:
Bought oled monitor, and absolutely love it. Very large jump in image quality vs previous ips screen.
Not at the cheapest price though, i bought it after price drop and price dropped again.

Also happy that i bought air purifier/sensor and a dehumidifier this year. My winter allergy and asthma symptoms are much reduced for the first time.
So i guess this becomes best purchase, and atleast now i know for sure that increased air pollution in winter causes respiratory issues for me.
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Which model did you get? Also did you bump up the size/resolution or did you keep it the same?
 
Tracer_Bullet said:
aw32, yeah i use 4k now ( 3080 ). I generally play few years older games, so its enough. 32 is very nice jump over my previous 27 ips ( Acer kv).
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So I am in the same boat, using a Nano IPS monitor and thinking about getting an OLED. But not sure of to things

1) Is it actually worth upgrading to OLED from a Nano IPS LG monitor especially considering OLED are very expensive
2) Even if I do decide to upgrade to oled should I stick to my current config of 2k/120hz or go up to 4k/120hz considering I like to play the latest AAA games and i only have a 3080ti.
 
My best purchase this year was my Grado headphones , got me back into the music the way I had forgotten.. worst was probably a ps5 as I ended up selling it and using ps3 anyway .
 
i_rock098 said:
1) Is it actually worth upgrading to OLED from a Nano IPS LG monitor especially considering OLED are very expensive
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Money perception is personal. It is expensive for a monitor, and i think tvs may have better specs for the price, but aren't practical at arms distance for me.
Image quality diff is huge, you can compare oled vs ips in mobiles i guess. HDR on top of that is a major improvement. I don't want to play on a monitor without proper HDR ever again.

1) That said, prices seem to be dropping quickly. So, you could wait a few years. Also you can look at lower size / lower res / lower refresh rate oleds when they become available. One guy here bought 4k 32 165? for 85k i think and 1440p ones i think have reached 70k

2) mini led could be considered, esp to avoid burn in risk. It has its own issues, better read up about it. They are brighter though and wont have burn in issues. Cheapest one from acer 1440p 27 i think was around 30k and 4k version is around 40k-50k

i_rock098 said:
2) Even if I do decide to upgrade to oled should I stick to my current config of 2k/120hz or go up to 4k/120hz considering I like to play the latest AAA games and i only have a 3080ti.
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yeah. considering the state of gpu markets and contempt they seem to have for anything other than the top model, this is an issue. fsr framegen/lossless scaling? maybe could turn 60 into high refresh rate, but below 60/50 it becomes hard to play. You have to use optimized settings. Also atleast you have 12gb vram which for now is just about enough most of the time, so maybe it wont be that much of an issue.

I just prefer to be few years behind instead. Makes everything easier and anyway i have a big backlog. Currently started on arkham asylum for instance.

btw, some HDR games are done better than others and i do have to tinker a bit via reshade. Ori ones are just beautiful. Doom eternal too.
Initially i did not see much difference (for HDR, oled is clear cut esp in darker/nighttime scenes) but once i started playing Doom eternal, it was night and day. And now i just use reshade/specialk to manage, we are also getting new per game mods via renodx.
There is additionally autohdr and rtx hdr for win 11 ( for games that dont support native HDR or have bad native HDR)
 
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