https://hackaday.com/2024/08/15/edge-lit-thin-lcd-tvs-are-having-early-heat-death-issues/
Canadian consumer goods testing site RTINGS has been subjecting 100 TVs to an accelerated TV longevity test, subjecting them so far to over 10,000 hours of on-time, equaling about six years of regu…
As for why EL LCDs still exist since they seem to require extreme heatsinking to keep the LEDs from melting straight through the LCD? RTINGS figures it’s because EL allows for LCD TVs to be thinner, allowing them to compete with OLEDs while selling at a premium compared to even FALD LCDs.
People need to stop buying the thinnest thing.
So what even is the point of the "thinnest" tv?
Is that 1/8th of an inch somehow going to REALLY make your TV not fit on the mount over your fireplace or something?
Consumerism requires that consumers be obsessed with the quest for the best.
They achieve that by making you dissatisfied with your current whatever. Your car doesn't have the latest and greatest entertainment system. It's five horsepower slower than the new model, due to its age it has maintenance requirements.
Your computer maxes out at 64 gigs of RAM. Your SSD is only 1 TB of storage and only works at 5,000 megabits per second where state of the art is 7,700.
The new game that you like will only get 60 frames per second when you're playing it. Better slap in a new $1,000 GPU or better yet buy a new $3,500 computer.
The girl you're seeing only has b cup titties, better talk her into getting a boob job. Get lipo. Go pay some surgeon $10,000 to make your dick a quarter of an inch bigger. Go buy a new house and new clothes, go on that big vacation and make sure you put it on Instagram so everyone knows how good you've got it.
As long as you are not content with your current lot, consumerism has achieved its goal.
Is this why people lost their minds and started hating bezels on their smartphones and bought phones with holes and "notches" in the screens instead? j/k...kinda
Go pay some surgeon […]
…go on…
I do wonder if there’s also people whose current TV dies and they think “thin” is a great attribute for some reason and prioritize that over image quality or reputation or something else. Maybe someone with a small apartment or living room wants to maximize available space?
It still might be silly sometimes/often but perhaps not purely an obsession with replacing working tech with marginally “better” tech.
There is really no need to make them that thin. TVs used to be a couple feet thick and wall mounting a TV meant cutting a big hole in the wall. 2 or 3 inches thick is nothing.
Instead, mount the fireplace DVD:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/92514650@N00/338467522](Image source)
Thin things look nice in industrial design. It's why phones stopped being chunky as soon as the battery packs could be scaled down. It's why EV cars are in higher demand than EV trucks/UVs. Watches became a prestige product when they were thin enough to wear on a wrist instead of fitting in a pocket. Flashlights became a collectors hobby after they shrank down to be palm sized while retaining their brightness. Cameras became ubiquitous once they stopped needing a tripod and flash powder. Smaller things, thinner things, are more attractive to consumers.
Things you wear or have to grab, sure.
Now, why would I care if my tv is a bit thinner? It's not like the thing is going to go anywhere, and I can't even see how thin it is from the sofa.
People need to stop buying the thinnest thing
Yeah, I think one of the problems is that thin is a familiar and commonly reported spec for a display. If MTTF were reported --- and it should be! --- then I think the problem would sort itself out.
Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
And having gotten to interact with the real process of product development, I gotta say in my (relatively narrow) experience it's based a lot more on vibes/politics than market research or focus groups.
I can totally see "make it as thin as XYZ" being a hard requirement for no better reason than a PM felt strongly about it, and no-one had all three infinity stones necessary to call them out (engineering knowledge, understanding of the PD pipeline, and political capital).
Do people buy the thinnest thing? Laptops or phones maybe to some extent, but TVs I sincerely doubt.
Some people like the glamour of super thin TVs, they're a bit like fancy sculptures.... But I'd wager most people just get the cheapest TV at their preferred size, with some accommodation for perceived quality or features.
What's the overlap of the general public, people who buy "fancy sculpture TVs", and people who still buy LCD TVs when OLED has been affordable for years now (I paid a grand for mine)? Keeping in mind that regular TVs already look impossibly thin so you gotta find someone knowledgeable enough to know that 3-5 cm is not as thin as it goes, but not knowledgeable enough to know LCD ain't shit.
Maybe there are enough of these people to justify a SKU to cater to their needs. But I can also believe that no market research exists to support that hypothesis, and it reads a lot like the average boomer's understanding of "the younguns and their flat-screen television sets" as if the switch away from bulky CRTs had only happened 5 years ago and not 25.
I have a 2018 OLED, and the ratio of comments by guests about thinness vs picture quality is 3:1.
Try to turn up the contrast and saturation to 200 %, that should increase the comments on picture quality :)
FR tho, mine is also impressively thin but like... I discovered that when I unpacked it? Thinness is not effectively conveyed by marketing material, and maybe it's because I haven't set foot in an electronics store in years but aren't TVs typically laid out in a way that you don't see them from the side?
Maybe I'm totally off-base and it truly is a big factor for normies shopping for a TV, but I just can't even really understand how a 3 cm thick panel would significantly impact sales compared to panel tech, size, cost, and ancillary features.
However now that I think about it, maybe "thick" LCDs can't go bezel-less? That I could easily understand how it impacts the overall esthetics (or even practicality with respect to Ambilight for instance).
Then ruins oleds too. Oled need giant heat sinks to work properly, but they've been being very thin and having plastic bags so they can look sleek. It's especially obnoxious because full array LCDs and uniform thickness OLED are much thinner than the protruding bulge that comes out on most super thin TVs.
I've never really been a fan of thin technology like this. Even laptops, the hardware needs room to breath. I'd rather have a thicker TV so it can breath. Just like the firetv sticks, those things really heat up.
Or just don’t buy LCD and get an OLED. All LCDs look terrible anyway. The technology is fundamentally unsuitable for making televisions.
LCDs are much better for outdoor use or bright rooms. Well, usually. The ones in this submission are clearly substandard.
The ones in this submission are clearly substandard.
I don't think so? 25 out of 82 random TVs.
Excluding the 18 OLEDs ... over a quarter of the remaining TVs in the test suffer from uniformity issues.
Wow. The "designed to fail" backdrop on the video says a lot about this. They're aiming for clicks, rather than rigorous testing.
I'm not at all surprised that TVs aren't designed to be used 24/7 by residential users. And I'm not at all surprised that running them for 10,000 hours straight causes a lot of problems for them.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that overworking them in the short term like that isn't the same as using them regularly and normally for 6 years. Some of those things might still happen, but some of it is death from overheating.