Samsung TV's Ambient mode - TV ad

Some of them do a very convincing impression of framed photos, or oil paintings too ...

Andy Burns expressed precisely :

Oh, mine will do that, not that I have ever bothered with it.

Supposedly about 30% of the normal operating power. However they include occupancy sensors, and so switch to standby (0.4W) when they figure no one is about to look at them.

If it is on a window cill does it give you a sneaky view of what is happening outside, whilst you are not visible from outside. Sort of modern-day net curtain twitching ?.

Some can do very convincing aquariums too, but they do use power but less than a real marine aquarium. Of course you would connect the Pi to a sensor so it didn't bother when you weren't there.

However, my Samdung does a very poor impression of a TV.

Really, why on earth would you want to do this? Sounds like Samsung are really scratching the barrel for some kind of innovation. How about sourcing longer lasting capacitors for their tellies, or making their apps for smart tvs work with their speech the same way the rest of the set does. I guess these would be far too boring and useful.

What does Bixby have to say about all this? Brian

Bah humbug. Brian

So you have the portrait of the naked lady on the wall, but set it to switch to a nice woodland scene when the doorbell rings. Brian

Nah, that's watching Love Island.

I had never heard of it until I saw a copy of the Daily Star whilst at work today.

Basically this programme

Which reminds me of someone (Big Clive?) who tested light sensitive LED night lights and found running the sensor took more power than leaving the LED on.

In other words the power consumption of the light saving night light was greater than one which was on all the time.

(possibly apocryphal story but) IIRC there was s sky box like that - where in "standby" it would turn on a LED to indicate that, but since it needed to keep the rest of the box running (but with the video and audio muted), so it could receive OTA updates etc, it actually used very slightly more power in standby so as to light the LED.

pamela has brought this to us :

I used to work for a certain very large banking chain. As you would expect they had many offices and call centres for their operation, plus the many other financial operations they were involved with, with numerous (thousands of laser printers). Concerned about their power bills, they commissioned specialists to carry out surveys to find how they could reduce their consumption effectively.

One suggestion was to install time clocks on all of their thousands of printers, so they were duly installed, simple cheap electro-mechanical ones. Like most modern printers, the printers when not in use would go into low power sleep mode, the sleep mode used much less power than the clocks, so the net effect was a tiny increase in the bill. Staff would often work long past normal working hours, only to find they could not use their printers because of the clocks, the clocks would also regularly become unplugged and get out of sync with real time. The time clock plan caused absolute chaos.

The real thing will run at 100W less, though.

I wonder if such a system would detect my cat sitting on the sofa in front of the TV.

I took a picture of my curtains behind my computer and used it as a screen saver which is similar ;-)

You need a nice old CRT set. The cat would then sleep on that - the hottest part of the room. Tail dangling over the picture.

If you had some sort of clever ability to switch between OLED and e-ink ?