Best Buy and Circuit City are entering new semantic territory by renaming regular 31.5-inch TVs “32 class,” a suggestion that anything between perhaps 29 and 35 inches fits into this vaunted category.
Matt Richtel also found evidence of 19 Class TVs (18.9″) popping up and got a fascinating explanation from Sony:
We also started using the word “Class” to describe the size of the television if the screen size was not, in fact, exactly the size at which that television is classified,” a company spokesman, Brian Lucas wrote in an e-mail message.
The marketing whizzes at Sharp and Samsung in Asia didn’t return calls (”(United States-based public relations representatives said they were having trouble getting information from the companies they represent).”) They blame manufacturing issues for the discrepancy.
While I’m totally down with saying a 31.5-inch TV is 32-inches – hell, there’s a little black band around most TVs anyway – this categorical renaming smacks of Soviet-era dissembling. Could Pyongyang be defining Samsung’s naming conventions “for the glorious good of the people and the Dear Leader?” We may never know.
I disagree, I am not down with the changes. This is making customers confused and ripping them off. Another shrink-ray :(
The reason for the odd LCD panel sizes is the specific lithography process that is used in the fabrication leading to a very strict pixel size per manufacturing process. At the same time, the LCD panels are designed to have a standard number of pixels and all of the driving components (buffers, scalers, decoders) are optimized for these standard resolutions. The bottom line is that it becomes expensive to produce an LCD panel whose active area is exactly 1920×1200 pixels, for example, and guarantee a 37″ diagonal while maintaining a desired aspect ratio.
The purpose of rounding this number is to make it easier to market, how annoying would it be to see a 31.543321″ TV sticker? The reason PR people always round up but never round down is purely due to economics.
Dear john:
Please restrain yourself from using political references in the story as that is the very reason which turned me away from bigger tech sites such as engadget and gizmodo. And its one of the reason why I only read crunchgear these days.
Your faithful reader
Zea