Brookleys Electronics Guides Advice Reviews

In honor of Earth Day, Retrevo, a site specializing in consumer electronics info, put together a PDF guide with a lot of good info about the environment and electronics.   Here are some tips from Retrevo’s guide on how to be greener when using your electronics: Turn off devices when you’re not using them – especially game consoles and TVs. Large plasma TVs are the biggest hogs but game machines are a close second.   Shutting down game players in the U. S. for just 24 hours would save enough energy to power the city of San Diego for a day.   Make sure they’re really off – use a power strip and flip the switch. Many products draw power after they’re turned off. If the charger in the wall socket is warm it’s likely sucking power. Use a power strip and shut it down to insure gadgets are really off.   If you’re going to leave your computer on, at least set them to Hibernate or Standby. Energy Star says the PC’s Hibernate or Standby mode can save up to $75 a year in electricity. And, don’t be fooled by screen savers – they’re no help at all.   Unplug the gadgets you only use occasionally. If you only use them once in a while – fax machines, or peripherals attached to your computer such as USB hard drives for backup – unplugging guarantees they’re off.    Use renewable energy to recharge small devices like iPods, cell phones and GPS. Inexpensive devices like the Hymini wind turbine, Solio’s Hybrid 1000, Freeplay Freecharge, or Kinesis Industries combo are easy to use and get your gadgets going in minutes. These hints are all apart of Retrevo’s Survival Guide to Greener Living with Electronics.   In this guide, there are more helpful hints, suggestions, and more information about how to live greener when using and buying electronics.  

If you’ve been shopping around for a television set in the recent past, chances are that you’ve been astounded by the wide array of television sets available. I’m not referring to the number of manufacturers. Apart from the brand names most of us have grown up with, most state of the art television sets today come from the Asian region, from companies in China, Korea and Japan. What I am referring to however, is the new technologies that are available. If on the one hand there are still cathode ray tube conventional televisions, on the other hand, there are innovative display systems like liquid crystal display televisions and even what is known as plasma televisions.

In the tried and tested conventional televisions that most of us have grown up with, the technology used is known as the cathode ray tube technology. A cathode gun fires electrons, which, when charged and excited, tend to form an image on a glass screen. These images form as pixels in the three basic colors, which when combined can produce millions of colors. While the technology itself has been fine tuned and developed through the ages to give us great television monitors, there are certain limitations to what the conventional cathode ray tube television can do.

For one thing, being built of glass, the screen of the cathode ray tube or conventional television has a size limitation. Most conventional televisions which use the cathode ray tube technology are less than 42 inches in size. This size is not the height or width of the television, but the diagonal distance between one end and the other. So, the biggest conventional television you can have is around 42 inches. Conventional televisions are bulky, restricted in image size and confined to the limitations of the box they are built in. This makes them big, and in some cases impossible to fit into your living room.

This is where newer display technologies have resulted in better, modern televisions like the plasma television. In a plasma television, the older cathode ray tube technology is left behind in favor of an atomic technology. Our ability to manipulate and control the behavior of atomic particles has also enables us to enhance our viewing experience. This is the technology that a plasma television uses. A plasma, is a gas that contains freely flowing ions and electrons. When an electric charge is passed through this plasma, photons are released, which then provide illumination. The rest of the technology in plasma televisions is concentrated on using this illumination to create the three primary colors and to display them as images. Just as the cathode ray tube televisions use different intensities of particles to produce differing colors, the plasma television also varies the intensity of the illumination to produce color changes. Which is why, while using a plasma television, more numbers of colors can be seen.

The plasma television removes or negates most of the drawbacks of the conventional television. For one thing, size is no longer a restriction, as the bulky cathode ray tube has been done away with. For another, bulky boxes are not required and the plasma television can be as thin as you could have imagined it. Most plasma televisions nowadays appear more or less like works of art hanging in your living room. So adopt the plasma television today and see how innovations in display have enhanced the quality of our entertainment!