Televisions

Entertaining energy

With an average use of 5.2 hours a day, televisions are one of the most time and energy consuming electronics in our homes.  Although modern televisions are much more advanced than the traditional cathode ray tube sets, the average screen size and use time have increased, adding to your energy bills. As technology advances, our televisions are integrating more with supplementary electronics such as game consoles, Internet and media players than ever before. Fortunately, new televisions also have innovative energy-saving functions and modes. While some of these automatically activate, others require you to manually change settings or your use patterns. Although the amount of energy use varies by model, televisions still use much less energy to operate than a refrigerator or water heater.

Efficient technology

The production and consumption of traditional cathode ray tube televisions has all but halted with the rise of high definition technologies. Cathode ray tube televisions have become obsolete due to their bulkiness, image quality and screen size limitations, and energy inefficiency.

The predominant technologies today are flat panel plasma and liquid-crystal displays (LCDs). As they become more popular, these televisions are becoming more affordable, with technology quickly advancing to keep pace with the high definition capabilities of auxiliary electronics such as Blue-Ray players.

Plasma screens

If you're a discriminating movie fan, a plasma screen may be the choice for you as they're found to have a wider viewing angle and better motion resolution and image qualiy.  However, the glare off the glass screen may be distracting to some.  Unfortunately, plasma screen technology is inherently less efficient than LCD screens. On plasmas, every pixel is its own light source, like thousands of tiny light bulbs. This means any increase in resolution equates to an increase in energy use. The pixels must also become brighter as the screen size increases, leading to an energy use of two times that of an LCD screen for an image of the same brightness.

LCD screens

LCD screens are more efficient even at higher resolutions because the pixels are on an LCD panel, rather than being lit up individually.  The image is created by a backlight shining through the LCD panel. The backlight can be cold cathode fluorescent lamps (CCFL) or LEDs. While LEDs are the most efficient, they can cost much more. According to CNET, LED LCD televisions save less than $20 per year over fluorescent LCD screens.

Rear-projection

This technology has been available for decades, and is technically the most efficient type of television per square inch. Rear-projection TVs magnify a small projected image onto the screen via lenses and light. They are bulkier than LCD and plasma sets, so rear projection screens are no longer widely available.

Digital

Compared with analog, digital televisions can receive more information for the same amount of bandwidth, equaling a higher-resolution image. Digital signals also stay more consistent (without fading or distortion) travelling over a longer physical distance compared to analog signals. Digital models come in standard or high definition, determined by amount of vertical or horizontal scan lines.