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http://www.macnn.com/articles/01/04/04/industry.clamp-down/

Industry clamp-down on monitor sizes

updated 12:30 am EDT, Wed April 4, 2001

 
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The Register reports an industry-wide clampdown on false claims of monitor sizes. Generally, a monitor with a 15.7-16.1" viewable size will be sold as a 17" monitor, an 18" viewable as a 19" monitor, and so on. The same does not apply for LCD displays, which are generally advertised according to their actual viewable area.


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  1. 0

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    04/04, 01:07am | report spam | Reply | delete

    K = 1000 or 1024?

    The large size of hard drives makes this point moot today, but a similar problem used to happen with hard drive sizes. The "SyQuest EZ-135" drive was 128MB. The ZIP 100MB drive was well under 100 MB as well when you used a computer K of 1024 bytes rather than their K of 1000. Come to think of it, drive vendors also would sometimes rate "all" the drive sectors even though alot of that would never be useable for storage. Par for the course...

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    04/04, 01:36am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Apple used to do this...

    I remember when Apple used to advertise their monitor sizes as being 13" instead of 14", and 16" instead of 17". But, the problem was that some clueless user would walk up and say, "Hey, for the price of a 13" Mac monitor, I can go get a 14" IBM!"

    Also, when I got my first Mac, the 250 MB (advertised) internal hard drive actually had 257 MB of usable space, unlike the current specs where you lose entire gigabytes because of the idiotic 1K = 1000 measurement used by drive manufacturers today.

  1. 0

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    04/04, 07:44am | report spam | Reply | delete

    modems

    what about modems that give the illusion of faster downloads with their 56k ranking, but don't?



  1. 0

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    04/04, 08:10am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Accepted practice

    I agree it's misleading. But at this point it's a long accepted practice to sell on actual size and state viewable size in small print. If the industry had to rename and resize all their monitors at this point, it would lead to even more confusion. Uninformed customers would complain they wanted last years 17" Sony CRT instead of the new 16" model, etc.

    Rather than change the standard this far along - better to just advertise LCDs as fully viewable displays and stress this as a positive feature to the consumer for LCD vs CRT displays....joe

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    04/04, 10:00am | report spam | Reply | delete

    Not an accepted practice

    The Monitor manufactures screwed up when the started selling LCD screens at their actual size. It causes some confusion when a 15" Flat screen is bigger than a 15" iMac screen, and almost as big as a 17"CRT. My old 19" Sony Trinitron TV actually has a 19" diagnal screen, but my Apple 17" monitors are 16".

    Just because it's an insdustry practice doesn't make it a correct practice, at least here in the US, most distributors do put the viewable size in their adds.

    Of course, now with wide screens coming, a 15.2" Screen is NOT the same thing as a 15.2" screen any more.

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    04/04, 11:32am | report spam | Reply | delete

    you mean kibibytes! :)

    The large size of hard drives makes this point moot today, but a similar problem used to happen with hard drive sizes.

    actually this isn't wrong at all. in SI units, "kilo," "mega" and "giga" are all base ten. a kilometer is 1000 meters, and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, no matter what anybody tells you.

    the proper prefixes for base 2 numbers are kibibytes, mebibyte and gibibyte. so if you're talking about 1024 bytes, that's a kibibyte, not a kilobyte. all this information can be found at this page.

    as for monitors, i know Canada has a law that you must state the viewable size alongside the "marketing" size whenever printed. still, i wish we could all just go back to using the viewable size only. oh well, i'm getting an LCD anyhow :).

    - j

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    04/04, 11:41am | report spam | Reply | delete

    you mean kibibytes! :)

    The large size of hard drives makes this point moot today, but a similar problem used to happen with hard drive sizes.

    actually this isn't wrong at all. in SI units, "kilo," "mega" and "giga" are all base ten. a kilometer is 1000 meters, and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, no matter what anybody tells you.

    the proper prefixes for base 2 numbers are kibibytes, mebibyte and gibibyte. so if you're talking about 1024 bytes, that's a kibibyte, not a kilobyte. all this information can be found at this page.

    as for monitors, i know Canada has a law that you must state the viewable size alongside the "marketing" size whenever printed. still, i wish we could all just go back to using the viewable size only. oh well, i'm getting an LCD anyhow :).

    - j

  1. 0

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    04/04, 11:42am | report spam | Reply | delete

    you mean kibibytes! :)

    The large size of hard drives makes this point moot today, but a similar problem used to happen with hard drive sizes.

    actually this isn't wrong at all. in SI units, "kilo," "mega" and "giga" are all base ten. a kilometer is 1000 meters, and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, no matter what anybody tells you.

    the proper prefixes for base 2 numbers are kibibytes, mebibyte and gibibyte. so if you're talking about 1024 bytes, that's a kibibyte, not a kilobyte. all this information can be found at this page.

    as for monitors, i know Canada has a law that you must state the viewable size alongside the "marketing" size whenever printed. still, i wish we could all just go back to using the viewable size only. oh well, i'm getting an LCD anyhow :).

    - j

  1. 0

    Joined:

    0
    04/04, 11:42am | report spam | Reply | delete

    you mean kibibytes! :)

    The large size of hard drives makes this point moot today, but a similar problem used to happen with hard drive sizes.

    actually this isn't wrong at all. in SI units, "kilo," "mega" and "giga" are all base ten. a kilometer is 1000 meters, and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes, no matter what anybody tells you.

    the proper prefixes for base 2 numbers are kibibytes, mebibyte and gibibyte. so if you're talking about 1024 bytes, that's a kibibyte, not a kilobyte. all this information can be found at this page.

    as for monitors, i know Canada has a law that you must state the viewable size alongside the "marketing" size whenever printed. still, i wish we could all just go back to using the viewable size only. oh well, i'm getting an LCD anyhow :).

    - j

  1. 0

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    04/04, 11:46am | report spam | Reply | delete

    ouch

    Omniweb decided to submit that 4 times. oh well, i hope that made my point clear! haha ..

    - j

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