16 March 2009
Sony's misleading advertising 2
Yup, there's more from our friends at Sony. It's the impossibly thin LCD TV which isn't as thin as they say it is. "Be the first to be seen," says Sony, "with the new ZX1". It's as thin as a CD case at 9.9 mm! But wait, there's an asterisk and it goes ... let's see, down to the bottom of the ad ... oh, here it is: "At its slimmest part". So it's not 9.9 mm thin then. My house is 1 brick thick* (at its thinnest part, the bricks that protrude from my window sills). My car is 10 cm high* (*at the front bumper). I don't have a pot belly* (*when lying down).
The picture below clearly show that more than 2/3 of this new TV is not 9.9 mm thick. Sure the LCD panel itself is that thin, due to the clever side rather than back illumination, but you can't just watch an LCD panel. It's got to have those, you know, TV bits and stuff to make a TV--power supply, tuner, etc. Sony have actually made all those things impressively thin, so the whole TV (minus stand or speakers) is actually only abut three times as deep as the screen. Wouldn't it be just as impressive to tell the truth and advertise the set as "an amazing 3 cm thick, and no asterisks required!" But once again, Sony's marketing department chooses to mask the very real cleverness of their R&D people with a downright, dare I say it, LIE! And the media are picking this up as if it were gospel, though most of the reports, even on tech-savvy sites such as gizmodo, uncritically omit the asterisk and accompanying phrase. Shame, shame, shame, as Australian media character Derryn Hinch used to say.
The picture below clearly show that more than 2/3 of this new TV is not 9.9 mm thick. Sure the LCD panel itself is that thin, due to the clever side rather than back illumination, but you can't just watch an LCD panel. It's got to have those, you know, TV bits and stuff to make a TV--power supply, tuner, etc. Sony have actually made all those things impressively thin, so the whole TV (minus stand or speakers) is actually only abut three times as deep as the screen. Wouldn't it be just as impressive to tell the truth and advertise the set as "an amazing 3 cm thick, and no asterisks required!" But once again, Sony's marketing department chooses to mask the very real cleverness of their R&D people with a downright, dare I say it, LIE! And the media are picking this up as if it were gospel, though most of the reports, even on tech-savvy sites such as gizmodo, uncritically omit the asterisk and accompanying phrase. Shame, shame, shame, as Australian media character Derryn Hinch used to say.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment