In the Black Friday advertisements sent around this week, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. In the Sears and K-Mart flyers, TVs were advertised as being “32 inch class” or “50 inch class” or whatever. Never a “32 inch” TV, but a “32 inch class” TV.

So I took a moment to look up the phrase. It turns out that JVC, amongst others, have started to market their TVs as belonging to a size class, rather than the actual size. It turns out, a JVC “32 inch class” TV is not, actually, 32 inches. It is, in fact, 31½ inches.

Meanwhile, all of the other circulars I am seeing (Best Buy, Boscov’s, Circuit City, etc) are all advertising “32 inch” TVs, not “32 inch class” TVs.

This reminds me of two things.

First, it reminds me of the CRT days. In purchasing a CRT computer monitor, you could get a “15 inch*” monitor. Not a “15 inch”, but a “15 inch*” monitor. Notice that little asterisk (*) there? At the bottom of the page advertising the “15 inch*” monitor would be a little footnote saying that the visible portion of the screen was only 14½ inches, or some other such nonsense. I was happy to see this BS die with the advent of LCDs, but I guess it was only a matter of time before they figured out a new way to BS us.

Second, it reminds me of the book cooking that goes on with other appliances. I have, for instance, a sound system that claims to put out 420W, yet somehow it only consumes 175. The law of thermodynamics being what it is, this is, of course, impossible. How did they get this figure? Simple. They figured out the peak amount of power that this sound system could produce through any single channel (70W, drawing from energy stored short-term in the capacitors) and multiplied it by the number of channels (6 — 5 satellites and one subwoofer) to get 420W. Never mind that it could never actually push 70W to all six speakers simultaneously. Incidentally, an exactly identical system sold in Europe is advertised as a 40W system.

Another good example is my shop vac. It is labelled “5.5 Peak HP” in big, bold yellow letters. BS. To actally deliver 5.5HP would require it to draw no less than 4125W from the wall socket. Too bad the wall sockets here in North America can only deliver 1800-2400. No, I don’t believe it for a second. I think what they did for this is figure out the motor’s maximum torque and its maximum RPM, and used these figurest to compute a “Peak HP” that is the purest fertilizer avaliable. Why is it no good? Simple. The maximum torque delivered by an electric motor is delivered at lowest speed, exactly the opposite of an internal-combustion engine. The highest torque and highest speed cannot exist at the same time, therefore any horsepower derived from them is nonsense, pure and simple.

Anyway, back to the subject of TVs, beware the marketing, and, just in case Sears is being the most honest, rather than the least by adding this word, better bring a tape measure and make sure your TV is what you think you are paying for. The measurement is taken between two opposing corners. Show them that they cannot, in fact, baffle you with their BS.

On a side-note, I just measured my 22 inch computer monitor. It is, in fact, 22 inches.