What You Don’t Know Really Does Hurt You!

David Berman - Director of Training & Public Relations for HTSA speaks out about some of the recent events that have taken place in the CE industry and why consumers are being misinformed when it comes to flat panel!

It continually amazes me that after some thirty years in the consumer electronics business, people still get sucked into believing the marketing hype instead of reality and I am afraid it is because they can’t find a trusted expert when they need one!.

Allow me to illustrate:

First there was Beta and VHS and everyone agrees that Beta was the superor format, but VHS won out. WHY? The answer is because marketing convinced people they would need that extra hour of really crappy quality video. How did they do it? Fear!

I don’t know about you, but better audio, better video, smaller tape size and better reliability, were more important to me.

Then there was CRT vs. rear projection. Rear Projection was CRT and it was superior, but people said it looked grainy and nasty; not as pleasing. That is the classic battle between performance and luxury.

Rear Projection TVs had much better resolution and color accuracy, but the source material was so limited in quality that when you blew it up on a screen that large, you saw all the imperfections in the image. Kind of like Ferrari vs. the Lincoln Town Car. You wouldn’t want to drive the Ferrari over potholes, but you also wouldn’t want to turn the Town Car at 100 mph!

If you wanted projection to look better, you needed to give it better fuel, so it didn’t amplify all the problems inherent in the signal you were giving it! Direct View CRT was a softer image that masked alot of the problems and as such survived with a significantly better sales rate. Near the end they even started putting shileds on the projection sets to make them look more like direct view.

There are many more examples of this phenomena invading our society and infecting the minds of potential consumers. None is having greater impact or is more disturbing than the battle between Plasma and LCD and the misconceptions associated with which to buy and why.

Fujitsu recently stopped making plasma products and one of the last great Plasma manufacturers (Pioneer) announced their intention to get out of Plasma manufacturing and begin to OEM from outside parties! This is the kind of dire news that drove me to wite this piece.

LCD has been outselling Plasma by a significant percentage in the marketplace and I keep scratching my head! Every time I have placed a customer in front of LCD and Plasma in a competitive shootout, PLASMA HAS ALWAYS WON! It has better contrast, depth of field, three dimensionality and color. So how then is this happening?

People have been told that plasma burns and glares and fails! Incredible, it’s fear marketing all over again! The fact of the matter is Plasma is a superior picture and is responsible for more than 63% of flat panel sales within the HTSA membership. Never mind that most of the myths stated have been propogated by LCD manufacturers.

Blu Ray experienced a similar phenomena and won out in the end. I believe a lot of the credit has to do with our sales professionals who inevitably recommend superior technology to their customers.

It is true that it took longer for Plasma to get competitive at 1080p, but nobody is watching 1080p except through processing and the processor quality in the cheaper televisions leaves something to be desired.

Remember to buy a TV for performance as you will probably be watching it for the next 15 plus years and unlike cars, which you will probably trade, you’ll be stuck with your TV~