Value Priced LCD HDTV With 50 lux Room Light Level (left)
Same LCD HDTV With 500 lux Room Light Level (right)
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It may be difficult to believe, but just a decade ago cathode ray tube-based TVs (CRTs) were the biggest sellers. CRTs have excellent viewing angles, outstanding black levels and high contrast ratios. The technology’s Achilles heel (aside from sheer bulk) was a lack of brightness compared to today’s flat screen sets. However, for most indoor viewing environments, the light output was adequate.
Not surprisingly, store lighting in the TV departments of major retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City a decade ago was subdued to better emulate home ambient lighting conditions so the sets wouldn’t look dim and washed out.
That’s hardly the case today, with store lighting levels purposely cranked up as much as 50 times typical home lighting conditions. Why the change? Because these intense levels can make the best displays with the blackest black levels and highest contrast levels look inferior to cheaper, lower performance displays. Not surprisingly, this leads consumers into buying the cheaper sets because they think they’re getting as good a set, if not a better one, for less.
Contrast, Brightness and Resolution
A TV’s native resolution, black level and brightness (called white level) controls its perceived image sharpness. Resolution of almost all HDTVs falls into two categories, 720p and 1080p, so from a static resolution standpoint, almost all large screen TVs today are about the same (either 720p or 1080p).
“Contrast ratio,” for example 1000:1 (or 1000 to 1) indicates how many times greater is the highest intensity white signal than the lowest intensity black one (the number 1 is the black signal). While that gives you a ratio it tells you neither how bright are the whites, nor how dark are the blacks.
Here is where stores utilize intense lighting to manipulate your judgment. In a typical home environment, the set that will appear to have a better picture and be seen as sharper will be the one with the blackest blacks and reasonably white whites (around 30 ft lamberts) rather than one that’s similarly bright but with lighter black levels.
Viewers perceive just the opposite in a high ambient light showroom. Invariably they choose the set with the brightest picture as having the clearest image, even if the set has poor black levels because the bright ambient lighting masks poor black level performance.
The Measurement Methodology
Last month, using a Konica Minolta T-10 illuminance meter, HD Guru measured the amount of ambient light in the TV sections of national retail stores and warehouse clubs located around Long Island (Sears, Best Buy, Target , Walmart, Costco and BJ’s.).
The measurement total depended upon the set quantity at each retailer; the more sets on display, the more measurements taken. See below for average reading per retailer. Daytime measurements in homeowners’ bedrooms, dens and living rooms also published below were taken with window shades and room lighting adjusted by the homeowners to their particular preferences. Not measured were kitchens, which tend to be far brighter than other rooms and where viewing time is limited and their smaller dimensions usually mean smaller screen sizes.
Store and Home Readings
Store averages (measured in lux) were: Walmart 411.66, Costco 742.77, Target 371.38, Best Buy 180.3, BJ’s 412.13, and Sears 236.58. By comparison, ambient light levels measured in 10 rooms of various homes ranged from just 1.2 to 110.1 lux, with all but two rooms reading less than 35 lux.
Why Do Stores Crank Up The Brightness?
Today, there are two basic retail categories: aided stores with salespeople, such as Best Buy and Sears, and unaided (self-service) ones like BJ’s, Costco, Target and Walmart. Price generally drives consumer purchases in unaided, brightly lit stores where the lower priced, poorer performing sets can appear to be as good as, or better than the more expensive sets. Get the set home and with no reference point, you’ll end up assuming you’re getting the level of performance observed in the store.
Management directs aided store salespeople to maximize profits. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it does conflict with making the right HDTV choice. How? Let’s assume you have a budget of $1500. HDTVs pricing is very competitive and store margins are low. Stores maximize profits by convincing you that a $1000 TV looks as good, if not better than the $1500 set placed next to it. That leaves you with $500 to purchase high profit margin items such as service contracts, “high speed” HDMI cables and power conditioners, when a perfectly adequate HDMI cable can be had on-line for under $10 and a relatively inexpensive surge protector is all you really need. Read this before buying a service contract: (link).
Vizio TVs offer retailers lower profit margins compared to other brands according to industry sources. Not surprisingly, with the exception of Sears, which is an aided store, Vizio’s retailers are unaided stores, where high lighting levels and Vizio’s low prices allow it to compete with and beat Sony and other established brands to win top sales positions.
The MHT Exception
Best Buy’s Magnolia Home Theater division (MHT), located within many Best Buy locations, sells the best and most expensive HDTVs, including top of the line plasmas and LED backlit LCD flat panels not found on the main showroom floor.In order to demonstrate the best displays’ rich inky blacks, guess what MHT does? Correct! They match the store’s lighting to about the same levels found in a typical home environment. Measurements taken at our local Best Buy’s MHT measured from 24.4 to 49.2 lux with an average level of just 34.7 lux! Yes, Magnolia understands that for its customers to see and appreciate the deep blacks, high contrast ratios and superior image quality produced by the more expensive sets it sells, it needs to duplicate home light levels.
Tips
Setting optimal black level for a given display requires adjusting user controls via the TVs remote control, with ambient lighting set to levels similar to what’s found in your similar level found in your home and specialized test signals.
Unfortunately, these conditions are not possible in the big box retailers and warehouse clubs listed above, so you’re stuck with the store’s showroom mode settings. However, you can get a relative idea of the black level of a given display regardless of the stores high ambient light levels by using this trick. Cup your hands forming a tunnel with your thumbs and index fingers making the front opening. Place the pinky side of your cupped hands against the TV screen and place your eye against the front opening. You will need to find or black area of the picture, if you’re lucky, black bars will be present at the top and bottom of the screen on a letterboxed demo material. This will give you an idea of just how light the blacks are on different displays.
Contrast Ratios Specs Are Useless
No accepted TV industry standard exists for measuring contrast ratios. Numbers provided by manufacturers are meaningless. The fake spec race is getting worse with many vendors now providing two contrast ratio specs, standard and dynamic. “Standard” is with white and black areas on the screen at the same time. “Dynamic contrast” is measured using a black screen with no content, versus brightness with a white area on the screen, resulting in a useless number. Who cares how dark a blank screen looks? HD Guru continues to get stonewalled when we query set makers for the methodology of their respective published contrast ratio numbers. The current record absurd claim is a published dynamic contrast ratio spec of 7,000,000 to 1. To add to the confusion, there is a natural maximum eye contrast resolution of just 300:1, according to a paper published by Siemens Technology (PDF link) (http://www.eizo.eu/html_76/ftp/bb_en...ge_quality.pdf.)
In an effort to rebut these published specs, HD Guru will be using a newly acquired Konica Minolta meter to make its own contrast ratio readings and will publish the results in all future HDTV reviews.
So, should Best Buy dark-light the entire store--even the kitchen/laundry appliance dept., movies, music, games, etc.--just to have perfect lighting across the entire TV section? Please.
So, should Best Buy dark-light the entire store--even the kitchen/laundry appliance dept., movies, music, games, etc.--just to have perfect lighting across the entire TV section? Please.
So, should Best Buy dark-light the entire store--even the kitchen/laundry appliance dept., movies, music, games, etc.--just to have perfect lighting across the entire TV section? Please.
They have no economic impetus to do it, but it's easy to section off a store display area.
This is how retail has always worked, for every product. Unless a company pays for there product to be placed in a certain area, stores will always put the high margined stuff at the front and at eye level. A $1000 TV may leave you with money in your pocket to buy other stuff you need, but may also make the store more profit. It is good business practise to sell the high margined stuff. As the article says, once you have it at home, you do not have anything else to reference the picture to.
Anyone who walks into a showroom and buys a TV without doing there homework, looking at the one's they like in different settings and asking lots of questions will not always get what is best for them.
I've had countless people buy a TV from me simply because the picture was brighter (and in their minds, better). When I was working at Walmart, I had the overhead lights taken out completely where the TV wall was. It helped a little but it was still way too bright in there to make an accurate judgement.
So, should Best Buy dark-light the entire store--even the kitchen/laundry appliance dept., movies, music, games, etc.--just to have perfect lighting across the entire TV section? Please.
No reason why they can't do this for the TV area. I've seen most Future Shops and CC's do it for the speaker area for sonic reasons so why not for the TV's?
The reason is clear, they want to sell the lower priced LCD's with extended warranties.
I was in Best Buy in St. Catharines, Ontario a few week-ends ago and heard one of the blueshirts telling a family that he'd rather buy a lower performing TV with a service plan than a top performing TV without one. My jaw dropped. I spoke with the family afterwards.
Anyway, it's no secret that Best Buy is rated an "F" with the Better Business Bureau, they're only slightly above the bait and switch websites. Good for Merson for telling it like it is.
No reason why they can't do this for the TV area. I've seen most Future Shops and CC's do it for the speaker area for sonic reasons so why not for the TV's?
The reason is clear, they want to sell the lower priced LCD's with extended warranties.
I was in Best Buy in St. Catharines, Ontario a few week-ends ago and heard one of the blueshirts telling a family that he'd rather buy a lower performing TV with a service plan than a top performing TV without one. My jaw dropped. I spoke with the family afterwards.
Anyway, it's no secret that Best Buy is rated an "F" with the Better Business Bureau, they're only slightly above the bait and switch websites. Good for Merson for telling it like it is.
I'm not surprised. I once had to tell someone that the aspect ratio of a movie they were playing on all of the TVs was incorrect. The man in the blue shirt insisted that there was nothing he could do about it. He told me that a cheap DVD player was hooked up to all of the HDTVs in the store via a set of RCA cables. That shouldn't matter as I am able to switch from 4:3 to 16:9 via a set of RCA cables on my HDTV.
He started to get annoyed with me because he knew he wasn't able to defend it any longer.
Nice conspiracy theory. 'Cause we all know, the retailers only want to sell the cheap TV's, the low-margin Vizios, they don't want to make money selling the expensive and high-margin Sonys and other such brands. They just want to spend a bunch of money on the top-line units to use them as display models and make them look bad so they can't move them. The logic is flawless.
It would be a mistake to take anything Merson says as unbiased.
they hire people that know nothing about tv cause its cheap labour.... and they are their to sell tvs only so what ever BS they can spill to the buyer they will to get the sale....
I have worked for Best Buy, HH Gregg, and Circuit City and I can honestly say one thing....I never purposely sold someone a lower performing tv just to make a buck. I would sell them a lower priced tv, but only because I thought it would fit their needs better, thus leaving them more money left over to get other extras like a warranty if they wanted it/a stand or mount for their tv/ cables if they chose to but them from us/or even the surround sound system that they always wanted but never thought they could afford.
No manager I ever had ever told me to do anything to the contrary. I know alot of people in the retail world DO use this practice, and it upsets me that honest people get put in with them. Also, I will be the first to admit that the stores hire alot of people who know nothing/don't care about what they are selling, but to be honest it is because the consumer doesn't want to hear their opion half the time. They just want someone to take their money/put the tv in the car/ get the hell out of their face. The last year or so I was in retail, I rarely put my knowledge out there, because nobody gave a shit. It sucks, but what can you do. Store lighting or not, customers only care about what their friends told them so even if the tv looked awful to them, half the time they still buy it...Bunch of mindless sheep if you ask me.
they hire people that know nothing about tv cause its cheap labour.... and they are their to sell tvs only so what ever BS they can spill to the buyer they will to get the sale....
This is bad management. No matter how cheap the labour is, a manager should train staff in product knowledge. If I walk into a store and buy something as expensive as a TV, speakers etc, then I am going to ask a hell of a lot of questions and if you cannot answer them, then I will walk away. Give me bull then I will walk faster.
from my experiences not even the manager knows much about their tvs - i am not saying anything about audio as audio specialist stores are great....
just heard many things that comes out of sales person mouths about tvs that obviously indicated they dont know what they are talking about.... but then again you also have the ones that do....
Believe it or not, but when I was shopping for a set for my wife's parents, I'd take every TV on the aisle and destroy the settings and then calibrate the set to my tastes so I knew what I was buying. Not surprsingly, I found the settings on the displays were obviously and purposefully set to make certain displays look washed out. This article is correct. At Best Buy, a hovering female sales manager was seething as I went down the row, set by set, fixing the contrast and brightness issues. When I confronted her about the fact that she had all the lower priced displays configured with blown out contrast and brightness, she didn't even respond to me, she just started talking under her breath into her nextel phone and walked away.
My fave story along these lines was Circuit City and a kiosk they set up where you could select to hear via a console a speaker set so you could attempt to discern how one group of speakers would sound versus another. Trouble was, Circuit City included a subwoofer in the assembly for the highest priced speakers, while the lower priced speakers had no sub. People with no experience in purchasing speakers could easily be fooled into buying flat, tin speakers because of such tactics. I actually went and unplugged all the subs so I could compare the bookshelf speakers relative to each other. It's no surprise that the lowest priced speakers all had the best performance (and they were crap, too - don't misunderstand, everything they were selling was crap -- but the cheapest speaker they were selling actually had the best performance, which is why they didn't have a sub included in the signal chain while the more expensive speakers has subs to fool people into buying them)
The last year or so I was in retail, I rarely put my knowledge out there, because nobody gave a shit. It sucks, but what can you do. Store lighting or not, customers only care about what their friends told them so even if the tv looked awful to them, half the time they still buy it...Bunch of mindless sheep if you ask me.
Any customer who acted the way you talk about above, deserves what he buys. If he ends up buying a piece of CRAP, too BAD!! Anyone who buys like that & is unhappy later is a FOOL!! Do your HOMEWORK 1st!!
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How Retailers Use Lighting To Confuse HDTV Buyers
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