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So the TV arrived this week, and a couple of days ago, with my freshly-minted license to hand, I unboxed it.

It’s huge. Far bigger than I’d expected, or really wanted. Get too close and you could be sucked into the weather map.

The most annoying thing, though, is that it doesn’t have an off switch. Well, it does, but it’s all cased up inside, and if you want to turn it off properly you have to take off the back to where the cable traces through and flick an industrial rocker.

Even the button on the front only puts it in standby.

So, it’s a scrabble around behind an armchair for the plug in the wall every time you want to turn it off properly, which in these apparently more ecologically-aware times is a bit lame.

But then I got to thinking. Is leaving your TV on standby any worse than having an alarm in your house that doesn’t turn off when it’s deactivated? Those little sensors keep on blinking at you as you walk past even if the alarm isn’t actually alarmed, and of course the code panel is always lit up.

And what about the countless hifis in the world, few of which really ever full turn off, instead showing a clock 23 hours of every day and playing music for only one.

Or bedside alarm clocks with glowing digits rather than a passive calculator style LCD with no backlight?

Perhaps TVs on standby are just a convenient whipping boy for all the other eco-unfriendly products in our homes that we’d rather not think about.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.