California enforcing TV-set efficiency laws

[Ed in Tx]

Originally Posted by Geoff Bourquin

...is standby power. I have a Mitsubishi DLP from 2004. The silly thing uses about 60 watts when it is off. There is a fan on the chassis that runs 24/7 to keep it from overheating. I'm pretty sure that they cut that back a lot in their second generation DLPs. In the summer that's wasted power, but in the winter it contributes to keeping the house warm, so I don't worry too much about it.

Things have improved since 2004. I can't even measure the standby power of my 2008 model year Sony LCD set, as it is so low it does not register on my Kill-A-Watt meter. Speaking of Mitsubishi DLP, I still remember a friend calling me on New Years Eve a couple of years ago in a panic trying to find a replacement lamp for their 2004-05 model Mitsu DLP set as the lamp had just died and I was working for a Mitsu-authorized service center at the time (like I can go up there at 9PM open the shop and grab a lamp from stock sorry.. ). He seems to get 3000-4000 hrs out of each one. Pretty expensive to run one of older Mitsu DLP sets.

[Eric H]

Two friends at work have 2005 57" Mitsu DLP sets and both have had serious problems with bulb life, like 6 months to a year at best.

One of them developed a PS problem and he replaced it with a Samsung LED Set.

The 50" Sony LCD projector I bought in 2004 is still running on it's original lamp with close to 10,000 hours on it, it's a 100W bulb compared to the Mitsu's 150W so that might be why it's lasts longer.

[wkand]

My new LG 50" plasma set is Energy Star rated, but the owners manual says the rating is for the economy settings only, and that deviating from them could cause consumption to run above the Energy Star compliant levels, without saying what they are. I've already lost the owner's manual, but it seems the rating was about 275 watts.

[old_tv_nut]

It's the tyranny of mathematics - the brightness of the screen is proportional to lumens per square inch - power-draw goes up as the square of the linear size. Designers are reducing the number of watts per square inch required year by year, but the old battery powered small screen handheld mentioned above is the technology that requires a whole lotta watts when you go to large screen.

[amptramp]

I used to work at a company that made LCD cockpit displays and we used to have to fight for every bit of luminance in the backlight that we could get. The LCD uses a polarizer which is usually only 43% efficient and the colour filters at each pixel can bring the luminance down to a third of that. The obstruction from the gate and source lines and the polysilicon trnsistors themselves means the transmission is about 8%. In addition, there are retardation layers to permit the viewing angle to be as wide as other technologies. You need a minor thermonuclear event behind the screen to get sunlight readability (which is what we were interested in for aircraft use).

The power consumption is something many people would think of as a few more bucks off their budget, but the utilities no longer have the capacity to grow and Californians are going to have to learn to live with power allocations. Some people believe the correct answer is to raise the price of electricity or add a tax to the more wasteful TV's, but as with the gasoline crises, price did not really affect public behaviour, only rationing did.