Plasma TVs in the spotlight
7 12 2006The BBC has finally picked up the fact that plasma televisions consume considerable amounts of electricity, which has serious implications when you consider that 70 million older TVs are set to be junked over the next decade.
But as always, the media is late to the party.
When I studied the electricity consumption of our old CRT television, I compared it with a typical plasma TV and found the plasma television would consume 6.73 times our existing TV’s energy consumption.
And before that I’d found research carried out by Oxford University for the 40% House had concluded that “a new technology that is inadvertently inefficient can be rapidly taken up into the stock, with negative impacts lasting for years, as in the case of large-screen plasma TVs which consume 350W in the on-mode, compared to 75W for the average cathode ray tube (CRT) TV.”
And now the BBC has joined the party.
Of course, in the interests of balance, the BBC has carry the manufacturers’ claims that you can’t compare televisions with each other, that some plasma televisions have eco modes, and that some LCD and CRT televisions consume almost as much energy as plasma TVs.
All of which is carefully aimed at undermining the original premise that plasma televisions used a lot of energy.
Needless to say, many of the people commenting on the BBC story then say “it’s all rubbish, I’ll get whatever TV I want”.
Personally, I will not buy an television that uses more energy than our current one and, if I could persuade the Other Half and the boys, I’d actually like to not have a television at all.
Did you look into LED or LCD models?
The most energy efficient television are rear projectors, then LCDs. To take account of different screen sizes, CNET did an extensive review of TVs and then calculated a watts per square inch rating:
Microdisplay rear projector: 0.11 to 0.15 watt per square inch
LCD: 0.16 to 0.41 watt per square inch
CRT: 0.25 to 0.40 watt per square inch
Plasma: 0.30 to 0.39 watt per square inch
Have a look at this post for the links http://stonehead.wordpress.com/2006/11/09/plasma-tvs-again/
I’d love to get rid of ours, too, but I’m the only member of the family that feels that way so it isn’t ever going to happen.
The OH is weakening (and I did convince her to get rid of the Discovery), but the boys are horrified, mainly because they like their “cinema” afternoons at the weekend when they get to watch a DVD.
My proposed compromise is get rid of the TV, replace the CRT monitor on my computer with an LCD one (uses much less power) and they can then watch films on the computer.
The result would be no TV (saving energy and brain damage :D), no video (saving energy) and an LCD screen on the Mac (saving energy).
I’m working on it!