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posted by martyb on Friday September 23 2016, @04:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the teaching-to-the-test-yields-a-fail dept.

El Reg reports

The NRDC [Natural Resources Defense Council] reckons TV makers are configuring sets to perform well on government tests, while in the living room they become energy hogs.

Its specific claims are:

  • The TVs perform well on the US Department of Energy-mandated energy use test--but that's based on a clip that doesn't match real-world video content. ([To El Reg,] that seems like a slip-up by the DoE);
  • TVs from Samsung, LG, and Vizio are designed to disable energy-saving features if the user changes their screen settings, but there's little or no warning about this. This, the NRDC says, can as much as double the power consumption; and
  • UHD TVs turn into energy hogs when they're playing high dynamic range (HDR) content, but HDR isn't included in the DoE's test (again, surely that means the DoE needs to update its tests?).

The NRDC says European testing seemed to match another observation it made: that during the DOE test loop, some TVs seemed to exhibit "inexplicable and sustained drops in energy use". It suggests that software is specifically detecting the test loop and adjusting the TV's performance to suit.

One assumes that "a clip" refers to the standard video loop used in the tests.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @08:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 23 2016, @08:56PM (#405713)

    Intended to reply anon, but forgot to hit the button. Run the numbers yourself. I too was sceptical. It turned out that it had a 6 month payback on its cost when I ran them (holy crap does "power saving" mode use a lot of power). The device I linked is the one that I have (several). I have a 1 second boot up time (from sleep mode) on the computer monitors, and. 3ish second boot up time on the PS3 (the slowest). YMMV, obviously.

    When running the numbers, I used 11c/kWh, 90% idle.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday September 23 2016, @10:12PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday September 23 2016, @10:12PM (#405746)

    > holy crap does "power saving" mode use a lot of power

    Glad I finally got rid of the cable box, which didn't even pretend to lower power when "off" (it stopped showing video, but kept the decoder ready).
    I read somewhere that a cable executive declared that saving power wasn't a feature the American public requested, so they didn't bother to request from the supplier the low-power modes that the chipsets do support.
    Unplugging that cable box meant a >3 minutes boot time, which sadly means an intolerable amount of whining from the SO...

    • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 24 2016, @06:34PM

      by bzipitidoo (4388) on Saturday September 24 2016, @06:34PM (#406008) Journal

      What is with SOs? Mine is perfectly willing to throw money away on a Netflix subscription, and rent from RedBox and buy from Amazon. And she still whines that I won't also pay for cable TV for her. She thinks the police are going to drag me off to prison someday for piracy.

      Her concern for the environment is highly selective. She'll sit in her parked car for 15+ minutes at a time, running the engine so she can enjoy A/C, instead of getting indoors somewhere. Even when it's cooler, she still wants the A/C so her allergies aren't aggravated by all the pollen floating around the great outdoors. Her fuel economy numbers are of course horrible.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @07:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24 2016, @07:53PM (#406027)

        > What is with SOs?

        Have you tried asking her, and then listening, rather than informing her that she's being dumb? Maybe, just maybe there is something you are missing.

        Nah. Women are stupid.