This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 15 Apr 2008, by Dwayne Harapnuik.
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06 Mar 08
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17 May 06
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Unfortunately, people are lousy at making sensible comparisons. Take televisions, for my first example. When comparison shopping for TVs of a given size, there is one picture quality attribute that dominates all others: brightness. Brighter TVs "look better." Differences in color saturation, uniformity, sharpness, black level, you name it, can all be overshadowed by cranking up the brightness on one TV. You can take out a video essentials DVD and "prove" that one TV has better objective picture quality than another, and people will still insist that you're wrong and proceed to buy the brighter TV instead. The second example is the world of speakers. The rule here is similar. Louder speakers "sound better." This one is even more crushing. You can make nearly anyone buy anything in one of those "listening rooms" by simply making one set of speakers slightly louder than another. Incidentally, you can also see this in the recording industry. The volume of recorded music has been creeping up for years. Music on modern CDs is compressed to an absurd degree, destroying the dynamic range in order to increase the overall volume. Different product, same principle: louder "sounds better." Back to shiny laptop screens. It seems pretty obvious to me that shiny "looks better," and that's why it's taken over the laptop market. This makes me sad, and not a little bitter. Thus, reason number three. People are idiots. I declare it the winner!
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