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Can we stop with the diagonal screen length thing?

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JavaJones:
with widescreen monitors, the height is very important.
Mine is 16:10, I already miss the height - if it were 16:9 I'd need another one on top...
-tomos (January 08, 2011, 12:10 PM)
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16:9 should never have been allowed to make its way into the computer world.
-nudone (January 08, 2011, 01:24 PM)
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Ooo, I have a blog post/rant about that waiting in the wings. I should finish it up and post already, hehe. It's actually been on the back burner for, oh, 2 years or so. Yeesh!

- Oshyan

Eóin:
They deliberately withhold that information, because if they did list it, even in the smaller print, customers would get used to seeing it there.  Soon, customers would get used to it and start talking about their tv's using those numbers instead of the diagonal number, because it just makes more sense.  So, in the office, when someone asks how big your tv is, right now we say 50" or whatever....but eventually, if that information was readily available, people would start saying 40x30" even if not all the time...but that would destroy the power of that big >>54"<< sticker that is so prominent on the tv's in the store now.  Anyway...
-superboyac (January 08, 2011, 03:09 PM)
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That's a pretty hypothetical conspiracy theory, and one I don't buy. Most people aren't good with figures, trying to compare tv sizes when presented with two dimensions gives you four figures to juggle, that's too much for most people who, frankly, aren't really that bothered at the end of the day anyway. So manufactures/advertisers give one figure because that's what most people want. Those of us who need the two figures can look them up/work the out for ourselves.

It would be selfish of me to want advertisers to confuse the majority just to make the my, and the minorities, lives ever so slightly simpler.

40hz:
OK. I just had to research this since it seemed too weird to be anything other than a marketing ploy.  :tellme:

To my surprise, my cynical assumption turned out to be completely wrong as far as I can tell.  :huh:

Seems the "diagonal picture measurement" goes way back to when TVs first started being made in the 1930s. Due to technical limitations in the manufacturing process, only round picture tubes could initially be built.

The picture was projected in the center of the tube. And the once massive furniture-like case (often with doors) most sets were built into put a rectangular bezel around the tube to mask the area that didn't show the picture. The diameter of the tube determined maximum size of the image. The "diagonal" is the length of the diameter line as it passes through the image area.

Like so:



This was probably the most accurate way to let a customer know what the image size was since the diameter of the picture tube only set the maximum size of the image. It did not reflect the actual size being projected. A 25-inch set could easily have a picture diagonal that measured exactly the same as the one on a 23-inch set. And many did because the smaller the diagonal in relation to the diameter of the tube, the better the quality of the picture projected. This was because image convergence became a problem the further out you got from the center of the tube.

Rectangular tubes were first attempted as early as 1950.

From Popular Mechanics (March 1950) - click to enlarge.

Can we stop with the diagonal screen length thing?

But non-round picture tubes didn't go into real production till around 1965 when Motorola introduced the first generally available rectangular tube according to a Popular Science (Dec 1964) article. Read it here.

Other manufacturers soon introduced their own models. In 1966, the FCC issued a ruling that TV images should be measured on the diagonal just like they were when the tubes were still round to avoid possible confusion for the consumer.

So it's definitely not a conspiracy.   :-[  And it does make sense in a way.  8)

But that still doesn't explain why they couldn't just put the WxH measurements on the box too.  :P

superboyac:
Bravo!  Freaking 40hz!  Thanks man.

OK, so as is usually the case with life's truth, it's not black or white, but a gray area.  So the diagonal thing is definitely not a conspiracy as I laid out above.  However, now that it has been a fair amount of years or decades since the tube limitations were an issue, why haven't the companies started using the WxH measurement?  I still insist that the reason is because the number won't be as big and they will lose ground to other competitors that keep using the diagonal.  So it's not a conspiracy, but there is a deliberate attempt to NOT show that information.

If I were them, I'd at least put the WxH on the smaller print of the display units in the stores or online, whatever.  They can still rely on the diagonal as their MAIN sticker or standout number, but somewhere tell us what the width and length are.  I mean, as someone stated, they give us all the other seemingly unimportant numbers, why not that one?

Actually, if it were really up to me, I'd make a standard sticker that showed the diagonal, length AND width all in a standard way.  I've already seen somewhat standard badge-like stickers that they put on tv's in the stores, and it's basically a big black sticker with a yellow diagonal going across with the number 54" shown on it.  Well, just add a vertical and horizontal arrow in a different color and smaller scale with those other numbers, and everyone's happy.  Right?  Nobody can say anything to that one.

nudone:
this is kind of a side issue, but remember "HD Ready" (which still persists). what GOOD reason is there for creating such a label and then sticking it on a TV that won't actually display images in HD; other than to fool potential customers into thinking they are buying a "HD" TV when they aren't.

that is one of the most cynical acts i've seen by the major brands against us. if they are happy to do that i'm prepared to believe they'll do anything to increase sales with little regard to the customer.

so, yeah, i buy into the theory of displaying the biggest number they can get away with to make the screen sound bigger.

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