Price Of Lightbulbs

Much more to do with the bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H encouragement given to the EU by the likes of Philips...

Reply to
Bob Eager
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Much of the climate and environmental side is more likely bollocks than not.

I think a much more serious problem is that of energy shortage, both at country levels and at world levels. This will result in wars and social collapse in differing areas. I'm not at all confident in keeping the lights on in this country, at a price which this country can afford.

I'm not in favour of stopping people using 100W bulbs if they really want to. But we should certainly stop people from doing so in the misguided belief that it's cheaper because the bulb costs

30p verses £2.50 for a CFL, and I see no reason not to impose a premium charge on those who still want to do so, even if we work out some way to make the costs obvious and up-front.
Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Nor me and I wrote it ..:-)

Reply to
fictitious

My experience is that LCD screens as monitors are OK but as tellies they are shit .

Reply to
fictitious

It happens that Dave Plowman (News) formulated :

No, my last CRT monitor was 19" costing around £500 when new - Sony or something similar, just one of many I've had over the years. I bought a

15" cheap LCD monitor, not really expecting much and for my type of use (mainly text and diagrams) was sufficiently impressed to dispose of the CRT. As already indicated, I have since got rid of all the CRT's.
Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

I've got a 19" LCD Acer monitor and I can't imagine watching anything smaller .

Reply to
fictitious

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>>>>> I'm also guessing that this problem is only going to get worse . >>

They do have the (IMHO very big) advantage of you being able to carry them into (around) the house when you get home.

tim

Reply to
tim.....

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>>>>>>> I'm also guessing that this problem is only going to get worse . >>>

I agree.I think I actually acknowledged that in here as one advantage they have .

Reply to
fictitious

Can you get your head around the fact that the dumbass here is the one who expects retailers to stock goods that don't sell?

For the avoidance of doubt, that's you.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Hmm. I changed to LCD because my monitor was getting tired and I wanted a larger one than the 17" Panasonic CRT I was using. But I'm less than impressed - and I don't do any critical graphics type stuff. A pal who is a very good graphics designer refuses to change from CRT - and doesn't know what he's going to do when is current v expensive CRT one dies.

Could you list in what ways your LCD is better? Only thing I prefer is the size and weight...

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

So did you buy a decent LCD, or just a cheap one?

He's a Luddite. Firstly the CRT image is distorted compared to an LCD, so he's not much of a designer if he failed to notice that. Secondly professional LCDs have a wider gamut than CRTs and oLEDs a wider gamut again. An LCD takes significantly less time for the colour gamut to stabilise than a CRT and the display is flicker-free.

The current Apple Cinema displays have been Pantone (and GretagMacbeth) certified as more accurate than any preceding CRT,

Since I know, in advance, that you'll bluster about this issue:

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Reply to
Steve Firth

My experience is that generalisations about such things are pointless. Each needs to be judged on its merits.

Reply to
John Rumm

IMHO the answer depends on the quality of the kit and the application...

I currently run a dual head setup with a 23" Viewsonic P225f aperture grill CRT, sat beside a Samsung 21" 204Ts professional LCD. Both giving almost identical viewable screen areas running at 1600x1200.

Which I find better depends a bit on what I am doing. The LCD is sharper (the CRT is a few years old now, and the CRT suffers more from the effects of running through a KVM switch), and renders text more crisply

- so emails, web pages etc are easier to read at smaller magnifications. Motion is smoother on the CRT and black levels are better and contrast wider. So typically I play games and watch videos on the CRT (unless they are very dark games where the LCD can make it slightly easier for creeping about in twilight). Photographic work can benefit from being tried on both - to assess the effect of the slightly different gamuts. The LCD also tends to render edge effects and JPG artefacts more visible than the CRT (bearing in mind the Trinitron tube in the the CRT is itself more prone to this than a "normal" shadowmask tubes). Whether this is a benefit depends on if you are producing content and are trying to minimise these effects or viewing content already created and just need to live with them.

So I quite like having the combination. However when the CRT dies I expect I will replace it with another LCD just to reclaim the acres of desk space it takes.

Reply to
John Rumm

To justify mandating widespread use of cfls one would need to establish all the following:

  1. climate is changing
  2. the change is caused by CO2 emission
  3. this change will be seriously destructive
  4. The only way to reduce CO2 emission is to reduce energy use
  5. the 0.1% energy saving that switching to cfls will give us will make a real difference

Yet the only one that has been established with any serious degree of solidity is point 1. 2,3 and 5 are just speculation, and 4 is flat out wrong. The climate argument for CFL mandation is simply not valid.

Dont overlook that insulation levels are rising on both new build and old stock, this much reduces energy use per house for space heating, a percentage of which is electric heating. Then there's the fitting of pilotless condensing boilers and more effective control systems. Plus the ever improving energy efficiency of appliances in pretty much all market sectors. I cant see CFLs having a lot of impact compared to those other measures, especially re space heating.

I certainly agree that economic efficiency is desirable, and CFLs are efficient for many people - but they clearly dont suit everyone, and I cant see any realistic justification to fiddle with other people's lighting today. If we do enter energy supply difficulties at some time in the future (and I'm far from convinced we will) many people will then switch to cfl of their own accord. To try to force others to use them today lacks any genuine justification imho.

...Why?

Do you also think we should certainly try to control peoples choices of which cars, washing machines, and pretty much every other appliance they buy wherever we can save them 0.1% on energy costs?

I dont see any sound justification for it. Even in the austerity and desperation of wartime such measures have never been mandated.

Then comes the classic question, if you can control my purchases based on your agenda, can I control yours based on mine? I think its immediately apparent that such an approach would do neither of us any favours.

I cant see any reason that stands up to basic argument to do so, and there are very good reasons to leave it to market forces. The latter is what causes the nation's economy to do ever better year upon year. The former fiat approach might (but often doesnt) get you a quick jump forward, but by breaking the end user driven market it reduces the incentive to improve on products, resulting in retardation of that economic sector for decades to come. The former USSR is a great terrible example of that.

Lets make this concept more accessible with an illustration. CFLs today, most people dont like them, so they dont buy them. There is thus a huge financial incentive in place for anyone who can solve the issues of CFLs. They could capture a massive market. And sure enough, the CFL market has been gradually moving in that direction - the change from iron ballast to electronic, the trend away from low initial light output and the reduction in bulb cost have all been driven by consumer desire and the profit motive. And those motives continue to strongly encourage further development that solves more of their issues.

Now compare this situation with mandated CFL lighting for all. In a mandated market, people buy your product whether they like it or not, because they need light to see. They will buy CFLs in equal numbers whether they weigh 1kg or 50g, whether they come on dim or bright, whether the light is nice or horrid. The profit motive for improvement is still there, but its greatly weakened, because people will buy whatever CFLs are on the shelf either way. So why would anyone sink a substantial sum into research or retooling? A mandated market holds back progress by reducing the incentive to improve, and holds back the business opportunity of those improvements (and business opportunity equals economic growth.) The result is that in 10 or 20 years time you're still stuck in the past, where a free economy would have moved on and be doing better.

A well known illustration is the Lada Riva car, which Russia was still exporting in the late 80s despite the fact that it was a 1960s design finished to 1960s standards. The worldwide desire for it outside of their captive command economy had dwindled to almost nothing - the rest of the world has long since moved so far on that no-one (in the rest of the world) is still buying 1960s design cars, yet in .ru the Lada Riva is still in production.

This is exactly the sort of thing Andy Hall was good at explaining, the fundamental principles of capitalism and libertarianism.

NT

Reply to
meow2222

An Iiyama which wasn't cheap.

Only on cheap ones. It's not impossible to make the geometry of a 4:3 CRT as good as any LCD.

Obviously his priorities are different to yours. Or are you also a skilled graphic designer as well as an expert on olive oil?

Gamut? Not a term I've ever heard used about monitors - despite being around those who use pro ones all my working life. Do you mean gamma? Not that that makes sense in this contest anyway. If you mean contrast ratio this isn't a problem for pro use where you'd be in controlled lighting conditions for viewing - unlike domestically.

Most pros are used to letting any equipment stabilise before use. Not that it takes long with any reasonable CRT - a matter of seconds.

It's an advert, pet. Nice to see you've joined dribble in believing every word you read in this sort of thing. Thought you'd know better.

When they produce a non CRT that gets universal acceptance for TV racks use, I'll be convinced. LCDs never will due to the problems in the dark tones. oLEDs may one day - but even then I wouldn't hold my breath.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

It's sharper, all over, in my case that's something like 1600x1200 ways better.

Reply to
tinnews

It might be that I only have experience of cheap CRTs, but when it comes to geometry, I have often been aware that the size/shape of the image changes between a very dark and a very bright scene. (Both TVs and computer monitors.)

And the other problem that has beset a huge proportion of the real ones I have seen (again, maybe all cheapos), is the tendency for them to actually be poorly adjusted. (Even if it would be possible to adjust them accurately, in reality they are not.) Hence losing bits or seeing teletext info across the top of the screen, etc. IMHO, getting away from those issues was a significant part of the betterness of LCDs. (However, I do accept that many/most LCDs actually have fairly poor colour accuracy.)

Reply to
Rod

Surprising that you wouldn't have heard of the term, the gamut is effectively the range of colours that a given device can display, it varies for film, crt, lcd, print, etc.

Perhaps all pro monitors use a standard gamut, hence it's not an issue that needs to be discussed, or perhaps they use a different term for it such as "colour profile"?

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Reply to
Andy Burns

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>>>>>>> I'm also guessing that this problem is only going to get worse .

It will be mandatory vegetarianism next, followed my mandatory euthanasia.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

Lack of flicker. Lack of degaussing that didn't work, lack of heat, lack of size, I cant think of anything about a CRT I DO like for a monitor actually.

Color rendition is surprisingly accurate as well, once set up correctly.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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