Samsung TVs accused of 'cheating efficiency tests'
Oct 05, 2015
Samsung TVs appear to use less energy under official testing conditions, according to independent tests
Samsung has been accused of fixing its TVs to use less energy under official testing conditions, drawing parallels with the recent Volkswagen scandal.
Laboratory tests carried out by research group ComplianTV claim to report that Samsung's European TV models consistently returned lower energy consumption rates under testing conditions compared to real-world use, the Guardian reports.
Samsung's TVs boast a motion lighting feature which the company claims reduces power consumption by reducing screen brightness when the picture on the screen is in motion. The tests conducted by ComplianTV, in which Samsung was not named, claimed that no reductions in power consumption were registered in real-life viewing conditions, equating to higher energy bills.
Volkswagen has announced that almost one in 10 diesel cars in the UK may need to be recalled after it was revealed that they are fitted with an illegal device that helps them cheat pollution tests.
They are mostly passenger cars, including 508,276 VWs, 393,450 Audis, 76,733 Seats and 131,569 Skodas, as well as 79,838 vans maufactured between 2009 and 2015. All petrol models remain uneffected.
Samsung has vehemently denied that its TVs are built with an equivocal cheat device, saying its motion lighting feature has been designed to reduce screen brightness depending on the nature of the media displayed in real life scenarios, and not just under test conditions.
A Samsung spokesman said: “There is no comparison [between motion lighting and VW defeat devices]. This is not a setting that only activates during compliance testing.
"On the contrary, it is an ‘out of the box’ setting, which reduces power whenever video motion is detected. Not only that, the content used for testing energy consumption has been designed by the international electrotechnical commission to best model actual average picture level internationally,” they added.
The European Commission has reportedly confirmed it will investigate any cheating allegations, alongside a pledge to outlaw the use of such defeat devices in the wake of complaints from several EU states.
“The laboratories observed different TV behaviours during the measurements and this raised the possibility of the TV’s detecting a test procedure and adapting their power consumption accordingly. Such phenomenon was not proven within the ComplianTV tests, but some tested TVs gave the impression that they detected a test situation,” the report stated.
Rudolf Heinz, the project manager of ComplianTV’s product lab, told the Guardian: “Samsung is meeting the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.”
Samsung denied that its smart TVs were monitoring conversations recorded via voice command by admitted some of its models were failing to encrypt the spoken commands, raising the likelihood of hackers gaining access to personal information earlier this year.
Cyber security experts Pen Test Partners alerted Samsung to the matter, and the South Korean company has now confirmed it has clarified wording in its privacy policy.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk