Samsung has denied claims made by The Guardian that its TVs have a special power saving mode which is only used in laboratory testing to give the impression of better energy efficiency. “This is not a setting that only activates during compliance testing”, a company’s spokesperson said.
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A report by ComplainTV written in February 2015, which does not mention Samsung by name, said: “The laboratories observed different TV behaviours during the measurements and this raised the possibility of the TVs detecting a test procedure and adapting their power consumption accordingly”.
A report from ComplianTV states that during their tests the Samsung TVs lowered brightness resulting in lower energy consumption.
To make it more credible, the company says that “motion lighting” is, in fact, a feature that reduces screen brightness in regard to fast-moving action movies and sports to slow-moving footage like weather reports.
Rudolf Heinz, project manager of ComplianTV’s product lab, told The Guardian that “Samsung is meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law“, implying that while not illegal, there should be greater transparency with the rating’s and specific modes used in future.
Samsung strongly denies their TVs have software to fool official tests. For the uninitiated, any apparatus that unduly reduces the effectiveness of emissions control systems in a vehicle under certain conditions is called as “Defeat Device” and automakers have been on the radar for using the same since the early 70s. The Commission has said that it is investigating these claims.
Three years earlier, the United Kingdom also told the commission that it had received intelligence indicating that a few TVs had been pre-installed with default software settings that changed static video signals to dynamic ones, reducing luminance and power consumption. “All very clever and it is not dimming so much that it makes a huge difference, but does the commission consider this an acceptable practice or is this a non-compliant activity?” We are immensely proud of these technologies and look forward to innovating further in this area. The feature has been standard in all Samsung TVs since 2011, and can be switched off by viewers if they want to watch safe in the knowledge they too can participate in slightly killing the planet a little more than is necessary.
‘Consistently high energy consumption rates’
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TVs usually eat about 10% of a consumer’s typical electricity use in his home, so you can imagine that in reality energy use could be even higher.
