Rogue Keeper on 11/12/2008 at 13:15
Marketing is a really efficient tool, there are goods branches of it like regional development marketing, social marketing or ecologically oriented marketing. But unfortunately apart from NGOs, the marketing communication is usually in hands of greedy corporate people. And if I remember I was dealing with it for 5 years at college... :erg:
Gryzemuis on 11/12/2008 at 13:30
Something that really pisses me off.
I need to buy a new television. My old Sony is 18 years old, and flaky. Time to replace it.
Sony, Philips, Panasonic, etc, all stopped making CRT televisions. There are only a few CRT models for sale. But made my no-name manufacturers. Not wide-screen. Small sizes. I am forced to buy a LCD or plasma TV.
Televisions have a resolution. Input signals have a resolution. In my area, I can't get cable TV, I watch via satellite. In the Netherlands, our main cable operators, and our one satellite operator have all announced publically they won't move to High Definition TV any time soon. The satellite operator has even announced they have no plans at all. That means I am stuck with PAL, and a resolution of 720x576. Most DVDs you buy or rent are still in this resolution too. Blu-Ray is still scarce and more expensive.
So my input is always 720x576. And I expect it to stay this way for at least another 10 years.
HD TVs have a native resolution of 1920x1080 (HD) or 1280x720 (HD-ready). Let's skip HD-ready, this is the absolute worst crap you could imagine. Let's focus on 1920x1080.
If your input signal is 720x576, how are you gonna display that on a 1920x1080 TV ? If you change each pixel into 2x2 pixels, you end up filling 1480x1152 pixels on your TV. It doesn't fit. Even if we ignore width relative to height, you still get pixels "in the middle".
To simplify the problem, look at an input signal of 2 pixels. The left pixel is red, the right pixel is blue. Now imagine this has to be displayed on a HD tv with 3 pixels. OK, you'll make the left pixel red, and the right pixel blue. But what about the middle pixel ? Are you gonna make it red too ? Suddenly the red object has shifted a bit to the right. Are you gonna make it purple ? Suddenly your picture has become more blurry. There is no solution. Your picture will get worse.
But HD-TVs are advertised as: "better picture", "sharper picture", "more details".
All a load of crock. Most input is still low-resolution. In my country (nl) for sure. HD-TVs will not improve picture quality. In fact, they will make it worse. Guaranteed. Yet all these shops and manufacturers advertise as if the picture gets better. And they stop producing and selling CRTs, which are perfect for my input signal. For at least another 10 years.
This is a marketing scam. And a huge one. I can't believe not more people are complaining about this.
Scots Taffer on 11/12/2008 at 13:50
Er, the fact that a lot of countries are adopting - albeit slowly in some cases more than others - hi-def terrestrial TV, or at the very least hi-def cable, I dont see how it's marketing exactly. Also, many households run modern-gen consoles and those run in HD mode.
Thirith on 11/12/2008 at 14:05
Added to which, DVD upscaling is no longer rare and can yield pretty good results. (Unless that too is a marketing myth, in which case my Full HD TV and DVD player with upscaling function have totally fooled me into believing the myth.)
Muzman on 11/12/2008 at 14:44
You could do a book on tech wank of that sort all by itself (I'm pretty sure there are comedy records about hi-fi wank).
Sometimes the marketing is actually vague enough to be innoffensive (aka legal) but the PR hearsay that surrounds it contains all sorts of BS. Like how they used to say that 24 bit colour, when it first came out, has 16.7 million colours (true) which is "more than the human eye can see!" (complete nonsense). Now, of course people are starting to get interested in 10bits and even 16bits per channel colour space because "That's what the pros use", says the same salesman who probably said 24 bit (8bits per channel) was more than you could see.
CD format audio had the same sort of stuff ; 44.1khz sample rate giving you more frequencies than the human ear can hear! Higher resolution than analog and more than you'll ever need!
All of which is designed to confuse you about your own senses and distract you nicely from the things that really matter like the quality of the components etc.
There are definately books and documentaries on the claims the cosmetics industry makes about skin creams and so forth to get around advertising regulations and scientific evidence (one classic I saw found a skin cream claiming the have an anti aging effect; in the fine print this claim was based on the fact that the cream contained sun screen and sun damage is classified as part of ageing)
Gryzemuis on 11/12/2008 at 16:22
Quote Posted by Scots Taffer
Er, the fact that a lot of countries are adopting - albeit slowly in some cases more than others - hi-def terrestrial TV, or at the very least hi-def cable, I dont see how it's marketing exactly. Also, many households run modern-gen consoles and those run in HD mode.
As I explained, in the Netherlands we probably won't see the majority of TV input signal to be HD, for at least 10 years. So for the next 10 years, I will have a *worse* TV picture than I used to have. And the other factor is: I bought my Sony TV for 300 euros or so. I can not buy a decent TV for 300 euros nowadays. The LCDs and plasmas are all in the 800-1500 euro price range. Even when you take 18 years of inflation into consideration, it's a rip off. Technology is supposed to be cheaper over the years, not more expensive. Especially not when the new technology is worse.
And if you think HD-TV signals will be widespread any earlier, I'll remind you of IPv6. I read the proposals for IPv6 in 1992. I read the specifications (RFCs) in 1994-5. I discussed the implementation of IPv6 in 1996 with my collegues. And IPv6 is still not here. In a way, we could look at IPv6 as a marketing scheme too. Not by the whole industry, but a marketing scheme by networking companies and individuals who completely missed the boat in the nineties, and were looking for a way to make themselves important again.
Thirith on 11/12/2008 at 16:23
Look for a second-hand non-LCD TV. You should be able to find something decent for an okay price.
R Soul on 11/12/2008 at 16:58
"Up to 50%" price cuts. Anywhere between 0 and 50 is correct. I saw this type of thing today, but the highest discount I noticed was 30%, and the most common were 10% and 20%.
I think Digital TV in general is a scam, not just HD. I was under the impression that analogue was working quite well, and then there was this sudden obsession with digital TV!!! You can get more channles, but they're mostly full of rubbish, repeats, or both. Perhaps it's been allowed because it provides employment for media studies graduates, thus disguising its uselessness as an academic qualification and making it easier for the government to reach it's absurd "50% of school leavers going to university" target. They should reword it to "Up to 50%" :p
Matthew on 11/12/2008 at 17:11
Someone's been shopping at Woolies, methinks.
R Soul on 11/12/2008 at 17:12
Yes, and they didn't even have what I was looking for. I don't browse.
Another scam is "2 for the price of 3". If you only need to buy 1 you might be tempted to spend twice as much as you were expecting because of the "bargain".
edit I menat 3 for the price of 2 :p :p
