Wwill it be pitch black on European TV screens in two weeks? Some rumors suggested this fear, but first the good news: Even after March 1st, we can watch TV and videos with our old devices to our heart’s content. However, all televisions that are new to the market will be subject to stricter EU rules on energy efficiency from March 1st. This means that things are getting tight for some new models, and some device types may no longer be sold in EU countries at all.
The new specifications are part of the European Ecodesign Regulations. With this, the EU wants to promote sustainability and set incentives for the development of energy-saving technology. But is it pursuing these goals with the right means? The introduction of new, stricter standards for the energy label in March 2021 already raised doubts about this. This label sticks to all new electronic devices and uses colorful bars to indicate how energy-hungry the shortlisted products are: Green stands for low power requirements, shades between yellow and orange for medium consumption values, and a deep red bar for the worst.
The reform two years ago was due because more and more devices, especially televisions, ended up in the green area of the rating scale. Even new categories, marked with plus signs, had to be invented to allow differentiation at all. After the label reform, however, almost all televisions were in the worst category G, visualized with a red bar. As a result, the new label brilliantly failed in its purpose as a simple comparison tool. At least at second glance, the label offers clues for energy-conscious purchasing decisions: for the televisions, it indicates in digits how many kilowatt hours the respective model consumes in 1000 hours of operation, and a second number indicates the corresponding value in high-contrast HDR mode.
Stricter energy efficiency requirements
This has not changed to this day, and it is also not foreseeable that greater energy efficiency will soon cause greater movement on the rating scale. Because the outdated EU forecast, according to which the consumption values of TV sets will fall by 7.5 percent each year, is based on experience from a time when the backlighting of LCD televisions was gradually being replaced from cold cathode tubes to much more economical ones LED cells changed – an evolutionary step that actually enabled larger leaps towards lower power consumption.
Since then, sophisticated technologies for higher image quality have been established: All televisions of a size suitable for the living room now show the images in the 4K grid, i.e. with four times the number of pixels compared to Full HD resolution. And the extended contrast range HDR requires higher peak brightness. Both drove the power consumption upwards; Increases in the efficiency of control electronics and displays were able to partially compensate for the trend, but not really reverse it.
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