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Is It Time to Replace Your First HDTV? (Video)
Millions of Americans bought their first HDTVs between four and seven years ago, because that's when prices for 40" - 50" sets started dropping below $700. Those sets are obviously between four and seven years old now. Are new ones so much more wonderful that it's time to get a new HDTV? Not necessarily. Alfred Poor, long-time display technology expert and senior editor for aNewDomain, has some insight here, which he shares with us in today's video. There's obviously a lot more to discuss about TV technology advances (such as 3d) that we didn't get to today, so look forward to another discussion on this topic in two or three weeks.
Christ, I havn't even replaced the CRT yet.
Those are not real 4k Blu-ray players - they only upscale standard Blu-ray discs to 4k. When the 4k standard will be ratified, even if it will still use Blu-ray discs, those discs won't play in these players because the standard will almost certainly use new codecs.
Also those 4k discs you can buy are really only standard 1080p discs. They are "4k mastered", meaning they are encoded from a 4k source, but downscaled to 1080p, and are usually using a much higher bitrate than ordinary Blu-ray discs in order to preserve as much of the quality of the picture as possible, since they most likely will be used in those upscaling players. Upscaling magnifies encoding artefacts.
Those 4k mastered discs also play in normal Blu-ray players, since they are really only 1080p. At the moment they are probably the highest quality video source available for consumer purchase.
My new 42" LED backlit screen consumes about 1/3rd the power (50-60W vs 140-150) of my first generation 1080p LCD, it also looks better. I probably wouldn't have upgraded if it hadn't been for a ghosting artifact caused by my HTPC menu getting burned in on the old one but now I couldn't imagine going back.
With a delta of less than 100w it will take you a lot of TV watching to come close to a break even on cost from the efficiency gain (say, 30 _thousand_ hours if you spent $350 on your tv). Efficiency is a good thing, but it is important to know the context.
Americans average 34hrs/week watching TV, so it would take 16 years (less, assuming electricity costs decrease).
British people watch less, 28hrs/week, but electricity costs more (average £0.145/kWh), so a TV costing £250 and saving 100W would take almost 12 years to pay for the saving.
My plasma TV's consuming ~350W now, with a dark sci-fi film (brighter scenes use more power for a plasma TV). The saving here would be greater: about 5 years to pay for, less since we don't just watch dark films.
Sources:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/annual-domestic-energy-price-statistics
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-reports/cmr12/tv-audio-visual/uk-2.42/
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/americans-spend-34-hours-week-watching-tv-nielsen-numbers-article-1.1162285