Can you really save energy by carefully choosing the colors displayed on a TV screen? Under some conditions, yes. Or at least that’s the conclusion of a team at the BBC that looked at reducing the energy consumption impact of their output by using what they call Lower Carbon Graphics. In short, they’re trying to ensure that OLED displays or those with reactive backlights use less energy when displaying BBC graphics, simply by using more black.
It turns out that a lot of British households play radio stations on their TVs, and the BBC sends a static image to each screen in this mode. As part of a redesign across the organisation, the BBC removed the bright background colours from these images and replaced it with black, with a remarkable reduction in power consumption, at least on OLED and FALD screens. (On normally backlit screens, 89% of British TVs, this does nothing.)
If you look hard at their numbers, though, listening to radio on the TV is horrendously inefficient; can you imagine a radio that consumes 100 W? If the BBC really wants to help reduce media-related energy consumption, maybe they should stop broadcasting radio programming on the TV entirely.
Anyway, as we move toward a larger fraction of OLED screens, on TVs and monitors alike, it’s fun to think that darker images use up to 40% less power. Who knew that Hackaday was so environmentally friendly? Black is the new green!
Header: RIA Novosti archive/ Igor Vinogradov, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Maybe the set manufacturers could turn the screen off when a static image is displayed for long enough ?
My very cheap TV does that (which I didn’t know until I saw it during a video with a static image) and it also has a setting to turn the screen off completely if you just want to listen so this just seems like a case where the TV Radio listeners just need to RTFM.
My Philips (R.I.P.) had a dedicated button on the remote control which turned of the screen. I used it all the time.
My “smart” LG has the same deep feature in some submenu deep in the settings app. I sometimes try to use but end up hunting for it, not finding it, then not bothering.
Even if you RTFM doesn’t mean the feature is there…
Like my TV has no way to select to use the TV speakers at all if any other audio sink is connected – so can’t actually watch something where audio quality doesn’t matter with the amplifier off or playing music without reaching around the back to unplug the cable from the TV. And also has no way to volume normalise the inputs – all of its video input are massively massively quieter than the normal broadcast.
It does have a few sleep and dim functions though.
I remember some TV’s had a ‘music mode’ that allows you to have the screen turn off after a while like a screensaver, just press a button on the remote to bring the menu back.
Do they still do this?
My new Sony TV (an 65″ X90K) has a ‘turn off screen’ option you can put in the quick settings menu. Two button presses and it’s totally off.
I checked power consumption with a kill-a-watt. The TV uses 170 watts peak (max brightness) in HDR content, 130 watts peak in SDR content, 30 watts with the screen on maximum power saving (noticeably dim but still visible) and then 15 watts while playing audio but the screen switched fully off.
I went from a light to a dark theme on my phone and laptop to see if I could perceive any difference in battery life. I didn’t!
My guess here is the backlighting is on, even if you have a completely black display.
Dial down the brightness. On every phone I’ve ever used, it extends the battery life by insane amounts.
It doesn’t help with LCD screens, unless you have what is called here a reactive backlight, which i assume is that backlight is divived into sections (probably much larger than a pixel) and if that section of the screen is black or dark-er then the backlight is shut off or “scaled down” to lower light. Disclaimer: i don’t know, i assume it’s something like that and am too lazy to check.
That’s why the “dark them-craze” seems a bit overreaction considering most displays do not support anything like that. I’d consider it “nice-to-have”-feature at this point. Or is there another reason? I don’t think this white-on-black text is any easier on my eyes.
Back here they quit transmiting radio over DTV years, probably 5 or more, ago.
That was supposed to be “dark theme-craze”
Oh yeah? Well dark you, too!
One of the first things I do with monitors, TVs, laptops and phones, is to turn off any “dynamic contrast” and adaptive brightness, because it’s friggin’ annoying to watch the screen brightness and contrast pump up and down constantly and inconsistently across the screen.
It’s a marketing gimmick that is used to print big numbers on the brochure, or to advertise unrealistic battery life estimates.
yeah! when it works it’s great (but i’ve never known it to work). i’ll be in a well-lit room, with a dark room behind me, and the screen will dim to adapt to the room behind me instead of the room i’m in…and it’ll get brighter and darker as i inadvertently tilt the phone in regular use, as if it’s a point light sensor instead of ambient light.
for the last couple phones, i’ve had a dumb hack i made…it’s an android app that responds to the wake event, samples the ambient light sensor for a couple seconds, categorizes it into one of 3 bins based on the max or average it sees, and sets the brightness accordingly. the biggest feature is it only sets the brightness once instead of again and again while i use it…but the other feature is by binning it into only 3 settings it basically categorizes its environment night time vs indoors vs outdoors. and the sensor is good enough for that. no one actually needs like 10 levels of backlight for whether you’re tilting your phone at your shirt vs at your face vs at the wall behind you!
I just have the brightness slider always visible in the drop down menu, so I can tap it up when I go outside. Usually I don’t need to, since the screen is readable enough at minimum brightness. It’s only relevant when taking photos.
It would be interesting to see a phone with a transreflective screen. They have one-way mirrors over the backlight, so they’re daylight visible without a backlight, but can still run like normal LCD screens.
Dude: I had a Nokia 5310 phone, with a transflective display. It was great! This feature allowed it to get away with a backlight that was only useful indoors or at night, while being perfectly readable in direct sunlight due to that reflector.
@Dude
Transflective does has a down side in you can’t make really tiny pixels with it – all the workings to drive each pixel end up reducing the returned light a bit too much. Though I’d love to see it more commonly used as it does work great for almost every device – the pixels can get small enough to be probably invisible or at worst not obviously bad at a sensible viewing distance for most devices. You just can’t put in that 4K+ screen on the phone – which is rather gimmiky and pointless IMO, its only a few Inch across the diagonal so roughly 1280×720 is probably sufficient (at least for the smaller end phones of that sort of screen ratio – so make it wider).
>you can’t make really tiny pixels with it
The OLPC XO had pretty tiny pixels. 7.5″ 1200×900 pixels in a transreflective color TFT LCD. 200 pixels per inch. That’s perfectly fine for a cellphone. It also used only 100 mW of power without the backlight, so a typical cellphone battery could run it for a week.
If it is LCD, it makes no difference, backlight is always on. It could make some difference on OLED and old CRT screens.
Yep. It does make a difference on my OLED phone.
I understood it’s the opposite for LCD because the relaxed state of the liquid crystal is transparent. It consumes slightly more power to display a dark image.
Slightly is the opperative word. The LCD uses so little power compared to the backlight that it makes no difference in practical terms.
It depends on the refresh rate and other factors. Generally it’s about 5-10% of the total power consumption. Reason being that you can’t just leave a static charge on the pixel or the crystals would saturate and get stuck, so the panel driver is constantly putting an AC signal through it as it refreshes the screen and that consumes power.
Depends on the LCD. Most modern TFT’s are “normally black” when unpowered/relaxed.
Unless you have a full array local dimming LCD. My TV has a backlight divided into ~60 dimming zones, and there’s a higher model with 384 zones.
I’d never given it much thought, but I’m a little shocked if it’s normal for a TV to consume 100W for any reason.
Although, in the UK, homes are heated for 9 months out of the year and never cooled, so inefficient domestic appliances are hardly a rich seam of decarbonisation opportunities.
“in the UK, homes are heated for 9 months out of the year”
What? Where does this data come from?
According to Statista, the UK average daily temperatures exceed 15 C for only 3 months a year. Given the poor insulation in the typical British home, that means you’re pretty much heating them all-year-round.
Nah, not down South. Heating goes off in March or April typically, and on again in October or November. No way are average daytime temps <15C for 9 months of the year.
Daily, not daytime. 24 hour average.
Duuur. You don’t need the heating on when you are in bed…
I’ve never understood this ‘heating goes off at X, and back on at Y’ statement.
This is what thermostats are for. You set your preferred temperature, and you just leave it. When it’s warm enough outside, the heating automatically never comes on.
It also means you do get caught out when there’s a sudden chilly snap.
Edit: It also means you DON’T get caught out when there’s a sudden chilly snap.
(It’s high time Hackaday got a better commenting system!)
Yeah, I only turn the boiler on for a few months normally. That’s because the rest of the time its heated by computers.
Back when PCs had 650w PSUs, I didn’t turn the boiler on at all one year.
> You don’t need the heating on when you are in bed…
So your house goes cold during the night, and then you use energy during the day to heat it back up. Same difference. If the average indoor temperature is higher than the average outdoor temperature, you’re losing heat, and you need to replace that somehow.
Whether you have to run dedicated heaters for that is another matter – all your gadgets are producing heat anyways. That’s also why these “energy saving” measures often don’t end up saving energy, because the heating systems run more to replace it.
I dunno, if I lived in a nice temperate place instead of the subtropics, I would probably set a fairly low minimum temperature for the majority of the house as long as my bed was warm at night.
Often, the natural heat of a fair day can add up to enough that by evening you’ll not need that much artificial heat especially after you consider waste heat from activities like cooking. It helps if you still open and close windows when appropriate, like people used to do. There’s no reason you have to only work in terms of averages.
Most modern sets don’t, and legislation introduced in March this year also capped the maximum power consumption. I know the 44inch TV I bought last year consumes 35W replacing a 20 year old Sony LCD of a similar size that consumed 135W. Quote re new rules: FlatpanelsHD calculated the maximum permissible power consumption according to the new restrictions and got the following results: for TVs with a diagonal of, for example, 55″, the maximum will be 84 W, for 65″ – 112 W, and for 75″ – 141 W (requirements apply to “standard” video mode — TVs may have higher consumption in other modes that are set manually).
Lmao greenwashing
Came here to post this.
>Feel good about watching TV!
How about just turn it off and throw it away?
My cynical gut reaction is that this would save a small percentage of power on a tiny fraction of devices which consume an itty bitty portion of the total power consumed. So, the real impact on power consumption at this point is likely negligible, even in the “big picture”.
I guess it doesn’t hurt anything (unless you are providing the funding to the BBC where some amount of money was spent redesigning the graphics to make a difference).
I mean, it’s the thought that counts. Right?
Sure seems to be the case these days.
Yeah lol. Eight shipping container ships emit more carbon than all land vehicles combined; changing the default color on your TV is not going to help. Buying an electric car is not going to help. Destroying industrial globalism is literally the only way out and TPTB will call you racist if you bring that up because they have massive offshore investments.
Personal “carbon footprint” style strategies were literally commissioned by British Petroleum. Climate change is real but these green strategies are fake and they are in the way, not contributing to the cause.
Fact check please?
https://www.cedelft.eu/assets/upload/file/Rapporten/2018/CE_Delft_7N59_The_basic_facts_Summary_and_Conclusions.pdf
This number is a internet myth, that originates in an old number of theoretical Sulphur pollution.
Cars as a whole emit more co2 than ships as a whole.
https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2021/04/no-sixteen-large-ships-do-no-pollute-more-than-all-the-cars-in-the-world/
Its hardly greenwashing, they are not saying anything beyond “This simple for us to make change will save a bit of electricity for our viewers/listeners, and if every similar provider did the same it is going to have an even better effect”.
It is just facing the facts that people are going to watch TV and use their ‘Smart TV’ to listen to radio programs on demand etc and that has a cost, this ‘LCGfx principle’ is making it in some cases significantly less energy intensive for no downside at all even on the accessibility front as far as I can tell… And when you have a few million or even billion hours of viewing time every month across the large population that really does add up – in the same way making every vehicle even something pathetic like 0.1mpg better would be a huge saving across the whole population if you could do it for free…
>It is just facing the facts that people are going to watch TV
They’d do heroin too if we let them. If we don’t get a handle on the masses none of us are getting out of this mess.
It’s not the act itself, but the media attention. Greenwashing is about directing public attention towards ineffectual environmentalism for good PR – to create the vague impression that the corporation or thing is “green” when it’s not.
Greenwashing is intended for developing a public notion in people that things are going in the right direction and they don’t need to pay any special attention because it’s already being taken care of.
And this really isn’t that at all – It is saying this cost free change makes this issue a bit better but it is saying nothing else. Nowhere is it saying this ‘solves’ anything or makes the entertainment provided in this way green, infact right at the very beginning it says ” Not surprisingly, this makes TVs the most energy-inefficient ‘radio’ devices.” – outright saying this method of listening is a bad idea really!
I might be revealing my age, but I recall when MTV’s audio was also broadcast on a stereo FM channel (though still cable) so it seems like a dedicated receiver would perhaps be the ticket. Especially with the BBC, since they have more control ove rthe “ecosystem”
– Heck, if decarbonization is the acutal goal, then just have a reduced tax rate for these receivers as an incentive…
I might be revealing my age too, but I used to watch live concerts on TV with the (mono) sound off, and listen on my hifi in stereo on FM. All with a 100W light bulb illuminating the room!
Can’t do that these days – the digital TV video delays are different from the DAB audio delays so they are not in sync. And the 100W light bulb has been replaced with a 10W LED bulb!
Back in the day, a live broadcast would have a short enough delay that people could play simple platformer video games on call-in game shows live on the air by pressing buttons on a DTMF telephone keypad.
See for example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_(game_show)
This is simply not possible on digital TV because the codecs require several seconds worth of look-ahead buffer to compress efficiently, and the data is further buffered at each intermediate step through the network, so in effect there are no more live shows on the air. It’s all been optimized for stuffing the maximum number of channels in a bandwidth smaller than your typical home DSL, so the processing delays are loooooong. Often when you’re watching sports, you can find an internet stream that runs half a minute ahead of the digital television broadcast, and has better picture.
Back in the late 1970’s, on a station out of the San Franciso bay area (I think it was KTVU, channel 2), we watched TV Powww in the afternoon. The game I most remember turns out to be from the Fairchild Channel F. I think they switched to another gaming system later.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Powww)
“stations without the special voice-activation-equipped consoles would have an employee in the control room manually hit the fire button when the caller said “Pow!””
That’s certainly one way to do it.
In the USA, NTSC Channel 6’s audio frequency overlapped the bottom of the FM radio range. So on receivers capable of tuning in way down there, one could have FM Mono sound for one channel, played through the Hi-Fi.
My parents loved 1950’s music so the radio receiver was always on during Sha Na Na on ABC, which was the local channel 6 station.
Now, if someone would build a small device, just to get and play radio transmissions over the air …..
That’s crazy talk!
60 years ago my dad built an FM radio tuner (mono, of course) from a kit (valves/tubes, of course). As well as picking up VHF radio stations it also received the sound from the two TV channels (VHF, of course) available at that time: BBC and ITV. So we had decent TV sound from his home-built hifi amplifier and speaker which was much better than what came out of the TV itself.
If modern TVs are used for radio listening they need to have a “sound only” mode where the screen is switched off.
One of my TV’s, a Vizio, has the ability to blank the screen. I’ve never really used it, but I assume/hope that it turns off the backlight. I’ll have to try it when the room is dark to see for sure.
It would be much more useful if it wasn’t three levels deep in the menu system.
Yeah, I miss the old green HaD.
100 Watts is nothing. One proper light bulb.
To put things into perspective, 100 Watts for 8 hours a day is 0.8 kWh. When you take a shower in the morning and spray yourself with 100 liters of hot water, your instant electric water heater consumes 2-3 kWh of electricity at once. When you commute to work in your shiny $50,000 electric car, you blow through that in the first 2 miles.
Besides, if you think 100 Watts is daft for something so trivial as a radio, an Xbox or a PS5 to play video games draws 150-200 Watts in addition to the TV…
eh, i always like to see Amdahl’s law… but also, my monthly household usage went down noticably when i switched away from incandescent lighting. the low current extended-runtime loads really do add up, even in comparison to the big costs. of course, the fractions will look different in a household with A/C or a tesla car. and even among those households, there’s enormous variation in thermostat settings and driving habits.
i’m saying, in my opinion, the fact that some people commute 50 miles a day shows a problem with that travel pattern, it doesn’t show the futility of trying to save energy on smaller scales too.
I recall when the light bulb bans were introduced, I checked that the average household energy bill for lighting was between 15-20% of the yearly total. Not small, but not that great either.
Given the fact that households and private homes themselves were/are about 20% of the total electricity consumption with industry and commerce taking the major share, switching all the incandescent bulbs for LEDs at 1/10th the wattage saved about 3.6% of all power.
Forcing private individuals to make the switch had a somewhat negligible effect on the situation. Likewise, whether someone keeps a 100 Watt television on means relatively little when the roads are sided with kilowatt-powered LED billboards every couple miles and every store window has multiple 100″ LCD monitors displaying ads 24/7. There are desks and walls full of computer monitors in offices and control rooms that are never turned off, even though nobody looks at them.
That’s not a small savings. Remember, we’ve been worried about trying to provide enough power for electric cars? Well, scheduling the load and producing the batteries are legitimate problems, but the total average power seems pretty comparable to the residential lighting savings in *very* rough figures.
The U.S. reports 2021 residential energy use is 11.6*0.2= 2.3 quadrillion BTU. That isn’t a great figure to use because part of homes’ energy use will be direct heating from fuel, but the savings from light bulbs usually doesn’t include air conditioning cost, so let’s just consider it an order-of-magnitude estimate. (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/images/consumption-by-source-and-sector.png)
I see a figure of about 3.3 trillion miles driven in 2022, and a four-door electric sedan needs about 1000 btu per mile. I’ve also seen a figure of 37 average miles per day per person is driven, or 11kWh per day with the same car. What that tells me is, the relative impact on electrical consumption from a person choosing between an electric and a regular sedan will be in the ballpark of choosing incandescent or LED lights, probably a bit bigger, but not as big as choosing more efficient HVAC or better insulation.
Yeah, electric cars don’t actually use up all that much energy – the main issue is that power demands of a household, or a residential area, can easily double when people start using them, and the peak power demand can be multiple times that if people don’t collaborate to stagger or slow down their charging.
Agreed, it’s all about the peak and not the average. Meaning that measures that adjust rates based on supply&demand (hopefully within limits) become necessary as an incentive. Ways to signal to consumer devices what the current price is or at least when is a good time to charge or when is a good time to voluntarily shed load may also become needed. But paying the same price no matter how much you use, no matter the power factor, and no matter how much power is actually available, is a luxury. I don’t want anyone to get gouged for emergency heating in an ice storm, but maybe a little variation is understandable in order to make it more practical to provide power without lots of oversupply and/or ‘involuntary load shedding’.
I noticed a drop in my power bill after switching every incandescent and compact fluorescent to LED. I need to get all the 4 foot fluorescent rubes in my shop switched over, that’s 52 tubes x 34 watts each. 1,768 watts if I turn all three banks on. Typical ‘universal’ 4 foot LED tubes that are compatible with magnetic or electronic ballast (I still have one bank of 8 fixtures from 1950) is 17 watts. Going all LED would knock the total down to 884 watts.
That’s quite a good savings over switching from the big T12 to the smaller “green” T8 tubes that are typically 23 watts.
A local large store has around 1,000 (yup one thousand!) 8 foot long T8 tubes illuminating their sales floor, storage, and office areas. I’ve sent their execs the numbers, how much power their lighting is currently using, where they can get a super deal on a large bulk purchase of LED tubes, and how much less power going LED will use. Multiply than by 80 stores in three States and the company could save a huge amount on electricity.
But they don’t care. They’d rather keep paying through the nose and all other orifices for lighting.
In contrast, I did the same for the Maverik gas station and convenience store in this town. Sent off to their HQ how many 4 foot fluorescent tubes they have, total power use, how much LEDs would save, where they could buy them at a good price. I also mentioned that LEDs in the coolers would also reduce their cooling cost because while fluorescent tubes aren’t hot, they’re still pretty warm. LEDs put out next to zero heat so upgrading to them in those big coolers and freezers is like opening the doors less often during the day. If the lights are left on overnight or it’s a 24 hour store, the benefits are even better during times when the coolers aren’t being opened.
Maverik didn’t get back to me but in a couple of weeks I noticed the fluorescent tubes were swapped out for LEDs. Probably some lower level person took the info, sent it up the chain and got a bonus for cost cutting.
I’ve converted quite a few 4′ fluorescent fixtures to take LEDs, and never have regretted it. The room always looks better afterward. Win, win, win.
The problem I have with some of the LED replacement tubes is that they only cast light down on one side, so the ceiling gets no light and the room appears darker and develops shadows in the lack of indirect diffuse light – but if the lamps are installed flush with the ceiling then you’d want the tube to be directional.
They’re usually meant for fixtures that already reflect down. But I think there may be some two-sided ones? Otherwise, I would probably use a very white ceiling and point them all upwards since I like diffuse light anyway.
All of the LED replacement tubes I’ve used (and I’ve used several brands) have a small arc where the strip of LEDs is, that is dark, but close to 300° of the tube is illuminated, which allows the fixture’s white surfaces to be illuminated. No dark ceilings here.
100 litres of hot water for a single shower seems huge to me.
(100 Watts for a TV set seems huge to me too: I own a 24 inches TV which is far enough for my usage).
What this articles does not point is that consumers / users have their role, and should not rely on “well, they have to build better / greener appliances”. Everyone can reduce its power / resource usage: think twice before buying the next “thing to have”.
I think that Hackaday is the right place to learn how to “upgrade” or repair things by sharing knowledge, and some initiatives like this one can be considerer as minim but contribute to a better resource usage.
A typical shower goes between 3 – 10 liters per minute. 15 minutes in the shower = 100 liters give or take. Of course it’s not all hot water – you’d scald yourself – I was counting how much energy is needed to raise 100 liters from the typical ground temperature to 35 C.
For a change like this that has basically zero cost to put in place saving even a handful of Watt is well worth it. Especially when you consider that this change passively works on millions or perhaps billions of usage hours with the shear number of people it will effect who have to do nothing at all themselves to benefit albeit a pretty small amount. Each user may only save a tiny fraction of kWh but the sum total across all the users really adds up, and for folks trying to live off grid or in places with really expensive electricity 100 Watt really is not nothing…
These numbers don’t make sense. A normal electric *car* (aka sedan not humvee) isn’t going to need 1.5kWh per mile – it should be more like 300Wh plus or minus a bit. That amount of water usage is like a 30 minute shower or something when I looked for modern numbers, so I disagree on your power usage too. The car should be able to go 2-3 miles with the 0.8kWh that the TV was supposedly consuming, if that’s what you got the 2 miles from.
100 watts is dumb for a radio because they can be built to consume essentially no more than it takes to drive the speakers, if you want them to be efficient. That’s why common emergency radios for bad weather could run for so long after being hand cranked for 30 seconds or so.
Also, “proper” light bulbs of 100 watts are hot, and if you use an air conditioner and have a 100 watt bulb in a lamp beside you, you’re going to be warmer than you otherwise would be. So not only do you have to pay for the extra electricity the light itself consumes, but you’ll also need to move that heat away from yourself. Whether that’s with a fan or by adjusting your air conditioner for the same level of comfort, at minimum you need to move an extra 100 watts of heat outside. Most likely you actually need to also move a bunch of extra heat because the same level of comfort is achieved by reaching a lower average room temperature to make up for the infrared from your radiant heater. If you have central air, you might find that a room far from the thermostat can be several degrees different in temperature due to an imbalance from only a small heat source, meaning even more cooling required if that’s the room you’re in. I *have used* conventional light bulbs. I warmed my hands over a 60 watt lamp in the winter…
100 Watts for space heating is basically tiny. It is roughly equivalent to having one more person standing in the room. The additional power cost for the AC to remove that heat – assuming it’s a decent modern unit, is something between 10-20 Watts.
The electricity needed to remove 100 watts is at least 100 / COP where the COP is usually 3-4 with the best I know of being 4.4. So I would expect ~30 watts. And yeah it’s only equal to about one person in a room, much smaller than typical space heaters, but it’s noticeable at a desk as you said. Or in a closed room.
I understand completely using them at a desk in winter; even if you have a heat pump the radiant heat is pretty effective. Luckily you can still get heat lamps and/or other types of bulb once you run out, or if you’d rather keep a few for nostalgia. For me, winter isn’t long enough to worry about too much.
> to make up for the infrared from your radiant heater
I actually use incandescent bulbs in my desk lamp exactly because they’re nice radiant heaters. I can keep the rest of the room cooler and not feel cold as I’m sitting at my computer. I’m just gradually running out of my stash of old bulbs.
I suspect that the energy required for Lasik Eye Surgery, needed after years of Dark Mode viewing, will gobble up all savings.
So, what eye disease do you think is caused by watching dark displays?
There’s just as many “studies” showing that dark mode is easier on the eyes as ones supporting light mode, it’s all just an artifact of the bias of the person selecting which one is cited. All of them have absolutely crap experimental methods and P values. It likely doesn’t matter, and is nothing more important than personal preference.
-Guy with 20-10 vision who has used dark mode and read books in the dark for 30 years, surrounded by a dozen friends with coke bottle glasses using light mode
I wonder how many people have a TV open in the living room, and nobody watching it – just for the noise.
The number of people who leave streaming services on overnight as a sleep aid is shocking.
I like to sleep to nature documentaries.
Apparently common in some cultures (eg Thai); I like it quiet but you do you.
I once turned a TV off at my brothers house that no-one was watching. My brother walked in, turned it back on and then went back outside. That’s apparently quite common behaviour as well, I really don’t get that.
We used to do this in the ’90s. Don’t recall it made much odds. Mind, we were drawing sufficiently low power to start with that ‘standby’ was adequate to just show a blank screen, rather than have to turn the output off…
I was about to say—what this reminds me of first of all is the shenanigans we would go through because we had OCD about preventing CRT or plasma burn-in.
I still watch TV on my Pioneer KURO plasma. Huge difference in power consumption depending on onscreen content: Black screen: 50w. White screen: 500w.
how bout you just manufacture it locally instead of shipping it across the dang ocean? How much CO2 would that save mr science man?
> If the BBC really wants to help reduce media-related energy consumption, maybe they should stop broadcasting radio programming on the TV entirely.
Several factors conspire to get this result:
1. most people don’t have audio systems that are separate from the TV any more. The TV speakers are the only sound source.
2. the settop box comes with no built-in display at all, or a crummy 8-segment LED that only displays a channel number. So if you want to listen to the radio, you have to memorize the channel number of the radio station, or use the TV to navigate to the station you want.
Agreed big as the BBC is it can’t single handedly force the manufacturer to make devices that are better for this job or really change peoples finances/habits. It can nudge, and being a reasonably big and well respected outlet nudge pretty hard, but it can’t fix everything itself.
“If the BBC really wants to help reduce media-related energy consumption, maybe they should stop broadcasting radio programming on the TV entirely.”
B#LL#CKS! Are really suggesting lots of different platforms, systems and networks for would really be more efficient? While the BBC are broadcasting, they might as broadcast them all together. It’s down to the screen manufacturers to make them more efficient, not the broadcasters. Oh, and by the way- the BBC broadcast in colour, not “color “! 😉
well said. That line was completely unnecessary.
There are MANY tuners that will play TV signals over a radio.
This line “…maybe they should stop broadcasting radio programming on the TV entirely.” Was completely unnecessary, unworthy of Hackaday in spirit, and ignores other possible use cases. Snark isn’t attractive.
Although it’s silly and all I do have to say that one of the reason I don’t care for HDMI audio much on my monitor is that you only hear it while the thing is on (showing a image) and only the sound of the device selected to be displayed, if I switch to another input I get that sound.. or lack thereof.
I have to use HDMI breakout devices to get audio, or simply use other audio connections, which I prefer.
I’s not a new monitor though, but I have zero hope that stuff has improved for monitors.
I would _love_ if document designers did similar to reduce ink consumption. Please: no background fills of color. Please: make your CLI screen grabs black text on white!
Hm. Not sure how this is supposed to work. Have to make your web pages mostly black so they don’t waste power on OLED screens, and mostly white so they don’t waste ink when printing. Many websites do have “printer friendly” versions of their pages, but having to cater to every contradictory use case is a pain. And I wonder just what portion (measured as a fraction total installed screen area) of TVs and monitors are OLED anyway. My own reaction is, I don’t print ANYTHING. I don’t even own a printer any more. About once a year or so I can’t avoid having to print something, and I go to the local office store for that. Yeah, I paid less than $1.00 on ink in the last year.
Obviously, the best solution to the non-problem is just don’t partake of BBC broadcasts.