Mildly Disappointed

One dead pixel and one dead green subpixel on the AW2721D; Dell won't authorise an exchange for less than six, but at least they're not really noticeable... Let's see if any more crop-up over the next three years. The bleed from the local dimming zones is, however, quite noticeable unless you tweak application brightness along with the display's "Dark Stabilizer" and "Variable Backlight" settings. Despite all of that though, it's a very impressive monitor for the price. I've put a Dell U2311H next to it, and it's night-and-day.

The AC1750 Archer A7 and the AC1900 Archer T9E occasionally reach transfer speeds in excess of 1Gbps, but much more consistently achieve speeds only nominally better than AC1200 despite being less than ten feet away from each other in the same room. Oh well.

Finally, can confirm that the BDP-S560 only does photos over DLNA. It's not like I was really gonna use it for anything other than playing old Blu-ray discs - nor did I expect it to be able to decode any modern video formats - but it would've been a cool feature!

Features

Went back to the thrift store for fun, and this time I snagged a TP-Link Archer A7 AC1750 router for $7! Found-out when I got home that it had OpenWrt installed and an admin password had been set :\ Took me a minute to figure-out that I had to press the the "WPS/Wi-Fi On/Off" button to get it to boot into failsafe mode, but then it was simple enough to SSH in and soft-reset it. Next I was hoping to get it back to stock (I may have bricked it once or twice in the process) and TP-Link's vaguely-documented TFTP recovery solution is a nice feature - though that took a few tries before I figured-out that the Ethernet controller on my Lenovo just didn't seem to be compatible, and then that the Ethernet on my desktop was too slow to transfer a 16MB firmware file within the set window before the router would just continue to boot normally. Luckily, my partner's HP laptop worked great! Unfortunately, none of the TP-Link firmware files took, so it's currently on the latest OpenWrt release.

Now I'm comparing the three 802.11ac routers I have, trying to decide which should go where...

TP-Link Archer A7: AC1750, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0

Linksys EA6300: AC1200, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0

D-Link DIR-822: AC1200, 10/100 Ethernet, no USB

...But since I'm almost never transferring anything over my local networks, I'm not serving any kind of NAS, and my Internet connection will always be the bottleneck, I don't really see any real advantage to any of them anywhere. Maybe the Archer A7 goes wherever the Archer T9E goes? Whichever has the best DLNA implementation goes wherever the Blu-ray player goes?