What They Say
DDay.it in Italy reported that the European Commission has confirmed to it that it will not review the energy limits for TVs from 1st March 2023. Makers had been hoping for a review as the original legislation had said that the Commission should review the regulation by 25th December 2022 “in the light of technological progress”. The Commission said that it believed that set makers would be able to comply.
This will impact 8K in particular as exemptions for 8K and new technologies such as microLEDs will no longer be exempt from the regulations.
What We Think
Hmmm…. The EU is a legalistic organisation and for the Commission to apparently ignore a legal obligation to review is surprising to me. However, the Commission ‘moves in a mysterious way, its wonders to perform’ as the old hymn puts it. The Commission is correct that set makers have been thinking about this and the key way that they will get around this, in the short term, is to ensure that sets are provided with the ‘out-of-box’ settings in a condition to meet the new levels. Of course, nobody will want to watch that way (with very low luminance) but it will meet the regulations. The sets have to be tested in their out-of-box condition as in earlier years, sets were being sold with the ‘vivid’ modes as default and these are power hungry. Many users never changed them. The EU wanted to encourage the use of lower power modes so set the regulations that way.
The danger for the Commission, if it really wants to reduce consumption, is that other sets than 8K will adopt the same strategy. That could mean more low efficiency sets.
No doubt there are some in the Commission that follow the line that ‘progress is not made by reasonable people’ and that by forcing the issue they may somehow, miraculously get sets to be more efficient. They might be right, as I often say ‘Don’t bet against the engineers’, but while makers have made great strides in the past, they have been helped by breakthroughs in LCD and in LED backlghts. (BR)
