Vizio VO320E 32-inch LCD HDTV with Eco HD Performance

Vizio's energy-efficient VO320E 32-inch LCD TV

External Link - Upgrade your entertainment system with home theater systems of the best quality at our sponsor, Shopping.com.

I'd like to elaborate on a theme I raised a couple of weeks ago regarding the amazing advances in technology.

Free enterprise and capitalist competition sometimes (deservedly) get a bad rap for encouraging greed and gluttony, but the flip side is that this same competition is spurring firms to develop better products with a small physical and environmental footprint.

Last month, I talked about this phenomenon in the desktop PC market where my new Compaq CQ2009F computer uses approximately 70% less energy than the seven-year old machine it replaced, weighs 70% less (fewer raw material inputs), takes up less space and costs approximately 70% less than the previous machine.

The same forces are at work in other technology markets, including of course the television market. When my bought my last TV (again about seven years ago), I think the only two options were CRT tubes and projection televisions. Both types of sets were large, bulky and heavy. I bought a 20-inch Sony TV on 86th Street in Manhattan, found that the box was too big to fit into the trunk or backseat of a taxi cab and nearly gave myself a hernia trying to carry the box 8 or 9 blocks to my apartment. The TV weighed nearly 70 lbs.

I'm a value shopper. Last month, I finally decided that prices had fallen far enough that I could justify upgrading to a widescreen 32-inch LCD TV. (I knew that plasma televisions have a reputation as energy hogs, so I didn't even consider a plasma set. Plenty of other consumers are apparently making the same decision and most manufacturers have already exited the plasma TV market or announced plans to do so.)

Vizio's energy-efficient VO320E 32-inch LCD TV

After loads of research (much of it conducted with the help of the shopping website dealnews.com), I settled on the Vizio VO320E 32-inch LCD TDTV with Eco HD Performance. What drove my decision:

1) Performance - I had seen Vizio TVs in plenty of hotel rooms and figured that the sets must be at least somewhat durable for hotels to install them in rooms where they would get heavy usage. The technical specs (primarily contrast ratio, brightness, pixel response time and viewing angles) all looked pretty good.

2) Reputation - Other Vizio TVs had generally good reviews - or at least no worse reviews than many of the other brands in the market. Vizio also rose from obscurity to become the #1 selling brand of flat-panel HDTVs in North America in just a couple of years. I figured the company must be doing something right to see that kind of growth.

3) Price - Purchasing the TV through Dell's website and using some coupon codes highlighted by dealnews.com, I was able to buy the TV for under $400 (including tax and free shipping). That seemed like an excellent price for a 32-inch LCD TV with the specs and reputation of this Vizio.

4) Eco Factors - The Vizio VO320E is branded as an "Eco HD" television. Vizio's website says taht the VO320E consumes less energy than traditional HDTVs and exceeds current Energy Star Guidelines by at least 15%. The tech specs declare that the VO320E should use an average of 84.5 watts when operational and just 0.33 watts in stand-by mode. For the sake of comparison, I checked the posted specs for a variety of other 32-inch TVs:

• Sony's 32-inch Bravia L Series TV (KDL-32L5000) - 99.3 watts, $549.99 via Amazon
• Panasonic's 32-inch VIERA X1 Series (TC-L32X1) - 120 watts, $484.95 via B&H Photo
• Sharp Aquos 32-inch LC32D44U - 135 watts, $499 via Amazon

Now I did not have a chance to verify power consumption on all these other TVs with my handy Kill-a-Watt meter, but I did test the Vizio VO320E and found that it came pretty close to its claimed power consumption, generally drawing around 86 or 87 watts of electricity when in use. Watching analog or digital channels did not seem to make any difference in terms of power consumption.

I also liked the fact that the Vizio VO320E was lighter than many of the other 32-inch TVs I considered. The 32-inch Sony Bravia, for example, weighs approximately 28 lbs when mounted on its base pedestal. For comparison, the VO320E on its stand weighs just 22.5 lbs - nearly 20% less. Less weight equals less raw materials, which should generally mean a smaller environmental footprint. (Note that this calculation is really just educated guesswork since Company A could theoretically extract more raw materials and produce more plastic in a more eco-friendly manner than Company B, but in the absence of details on extraction and production methods, weight seems like a reasonable factor to consider when calculating the environmental impact of household machines.

Conclusions:

• Unfortunately, I no longer have the receipt for my old 20-inch CRT TV, but I'm fairly confident that the TV cost somewhere north of $500 when I purchased it back in late 2001 or early 2002. That makes the Vizio at least 20% less expensive for a television that weighs almost 70% less, is almost 80% thinner and provides a screen more than twice as large (as calculated by square centimeters) compared to the old TV. That certainly sounds like remarkable progress.

• LCD manufacturers are making remarkable strides in terms of power consumption. As measured in my original Kill-a-Watt review last year, the 20-inch Sony CRT required approximately 70-watts of power consumption. The new Vizio delivers a much brighter, clearer and more than twice as large image with only 25% more power. And the amount of electricity needed to power a flat-panel TV will surely fall further if history is any guide. Consider Vizio's VX32L LCD HDTV launched in 2007. That earlier generation Vizio LCD TV weighed 32 lbs (42% more than the VO320E) and had an average 180-watt power consumption! Take a minute to consider that fact - in just two years, Vizio lowered the power consumption on its 32-inch LCD TV sets more than 50%. If the trend continues, the latest generation 32-inch sets sold in 2011 will need only around 40 watts of power. A 2013 LCD TV will need only 20 watts of power and so forth. If we can achieve similar reductions in the energy needs of other household appliances, imagine the cumulative effect on the energy needs of the our nation and other nations around the world.

On the other hand...

• It's great to highlight the latest and most energy-efficient appliances and electronics, but do better/smaller gadgets solve our environmental problems or contribute to them? Consider that nothing was truly wrong with my old Sony CRT TV. The television still worked fine. In an age where television technology had stagnated, I (and millions of other consumers) would probably have kept our CRT televisions for another 10 or 20 years. My parents kept televisions for decades. The calculation is complicated by the fact that my new TV may be more efficient than my old TV (it certainly uses less energy than a 32-inch CRT), but in absolute terms it actually increased my energy consumption a little bit.

• To extrapolate on this last point, Good Clean Tech recently ran a story about a French report suggesting that any efficiency gains in electronics have been outweighed by skyrocketing demand. The argument goes something like this - each new PC may be more energy efficient, but if falling prices and increasing functionality prompt a family to upgrade from one family computer to four computers (one for each famly member), energy usage will actually go up.

How can consumers who are concerned about the environment deal with this challenge? It sounds obvious, but I think all of us simply need to consider the environmental impact of each purchase decision. Are you purchasing a new television because it will significantly enhance your quality of life or simply because you want the latest toy? Manufacturers are experts at stoking consumer wants and getting us excited about the latest bells-and-whistles on their gadgets. But is it worth going into debt or stressing the environment simply to keep up with the Gateses?

In our household, we watch a lot of movies on DVD and the new TV has made a huge improvement in this entertainment experience for only a small increase in energy usage. It's slim size has also made our one-bedroom NYC apartment seem a lot more spacious. So it's had a major impact on our lives, but I can't see upgrading to a larger or slimmer TV anytime soon unless the manufacturers had made another major improvement in energy efficiency - saying reducing the energy usage to just 20 watts without losing performance. (Of course, if efficiency improvements continue apace, we could reach that point in just another few years.)

Ultimately, I believe most people do want to reduce our impact on the environment. Simply by taking the time to consider environmental factors like energy consumption in our purchase decisions we can perhaps accelerate the move toward greater energy efficiency and lower overall energy usage.

Final thoughts - I haven't spent much time talking specifically about the Vizio VO320E's performance in this rather long review, but overall I'm extremely pleased. The picture is bright and beautiful - especially on digital HD channels. The menus are easy to use and the TV's scan feature found us several channels we could not access before. I only have three quibbles:

1. The remote control started acting very wacky on the first day of usage. Essentially, it started communicating with my stereo (turning it on and off) and refusing to communicate with the TV. After 10 nerve-wracking minutes, I finally managed to get the TV and remote talking to each other again. I'm still not sure what went wrong, so I'm a bit anxious at the thought it might happen again.

2. The VO320E lacks a headphone jack. As mentioned, I share a one-bedroom apartment and office with my spouse. Sometimes one of us wants to watch TV while the other works. Our old TV made this easy with a headphone jack right on the front panel. The Vizio VO320E has no headphone jack. Apparently, Vizio's consumer research indicates that most people don't want this feature and don't care about it, so Vizio eliminated it to save money. I do appreciate the good value of the Vizio set, but found the headset jack's absence extremely annoying. Ultimately, I was able to find a cable (RCA input to female headphone jack) at J&R that allowed me to connect the headphones, but encountered another problem when the volume controls on the TV had no impact on the uncomfortably loud sound coming through the headset. Fortunately, I had a backup pair of headphones with an in-line volume control on the headset wire. With this ad-hoc setup, we are able to watch TV and use the headphones, but it isn't very customer friendly.

3) The third quibble is the most annoying for me. Most television manufacturers insist upon putting obnoxiously large and prominent versions of their logo and name on the front of their television sets. Personally, I can't imagine why they think that viewers want to be distracted from their shows by obtrusive set logos. I'd prefer a tiny logo/name in the same color as the rest of the set. In any case, Vizio has outdone their competitors in the Logo Distraction wars by making their logo glow - orange when the set is off and white when the TV is on. I have to admit that the soft orange glow doesn't really bother me when the set is off. It wastes a little bit of power (which is annoying from an eco perspective), but I guess it also helps keep me from bumping into the set if I get out of bed in the middle of the night. On the other hand, having a glowing white logo below an active screen seems just totally idiotic.

I'm not the only one bothered by the glowing logo. Plenty of other online reviewers have complained and message boards are filled with Vizio owners asking if there's any way to turn off the glowing logo. (Apparently there isn't.)

In any case, there is an easy way to solve the problem - just go out to Staples or whichever office supply shop you like and buy some black card stock paper. Cut a little rectangle just large enough to completely cover the Vizio logo and tape it to the frame of the TV. If you pick your card stock carefully, the paper will be unobtrusive by day and invisible when watching the TV in a dark room. Again, this problem was not insurmountable, but forcing the customer to come up with an inventive solution to a unnecessary problem is just stupid from a design standpoint. At the very least, Vizio should give consumers a menu option to turn off the glowing logo. (I'd make the 'off' setting into the default option, but that's just me...)

Would I recommend the Vizio VO320E to a friend?

Yes. I still think this is a great TV for the price with nice eco-friendly qualities and efficiencies. I'd like to see Vizio address some of the flaws listed above, but in the meantime I've got plenty of leftover black card stock if you need it.

Where to buy:

Vizio's website directs shoppers to Walmart.com where the VO320E is on sale for $398.

Pangea Organics Body Care

The Product:

Pangea Organics body care products (prices vary from $8 for bar soap to $40 for facial mask)

The Promise:

• No petrochemicals, sulfates, detergents, synthetic preservatives, artificial colors/fragrances or GMOs.

• Organic, fair trade (whenever possible), cruelty-free

• Molded fiber packaging made from 100% post-consumer newsprint without glues or dyes. Packaging has been impregnated with seeds from the same plants found in Pangea Organics products.

• A 100% wind-powered facility where the carpets are made from recycled soda bottles, the paint is non-VOC and the workers are paid a living wage.
  

The Reality:

We believe that the USDA only provides organic certification for food ingredients, so it would be nice if Pangea provided some information on how it knows its ingredients are organic. We've seen other cosmetics brands - particularly European ones - that contain the logo of one or more organic certification authorities, but Pangea seems to have foregone this step.

Other than that, the product and packaging seem to match the descriptions on the website and press materials.

The Experience:

The organic essential oils (sage and geranium in massage oil; blood orange, lavender and and Egyptian calendula) in Pangea products give them a truly heavenly scent.

We thoroughly liked all the Pangea cleansing products that we tried. The facial cleanser seemed to do an especially nice job on our 'problem' skin ($28), which perhaps explains why the cleanser won a Redbook MVP Beauty Award.

And cinnamon-lovers will be over the moon about the Malagasy Cinnamon Cassia with Cloves bar soap ($8). Incidentally, the soap not only smells great, but it looks like a work of art.

Inside the seeded boxes, Pangea packages all its products either in glass or #2 HDPE plastic, both of which are very recyclable. The caps on the shower gels and lotions are apparently also recyclable.

As for the seeded boxes, they all contain sweet basil seeds except for the bar soap, which has the seed of a spruce tree.

We love the idea of 100% post-consumer recycled packaging, especially when it comes with a bonus of free plant seeds! Not only does Pangea packaging reduce trash, it actually promotes plant life!

The packaging is so innovative that we almost feel silly complaining, but as advocate for eco-minded consumers everywhere, we wish that Pangea had put different types of seeds with different product boxes. If you buy six different Pangea products, you get six boxes impregnated with basil seeds. How about some oregano? Maybe a little rosemary?

(Also, it's not immediately clear from the boxes that you need to remove the label - which does appear to be held onto the box with a bit of glue - in order to access the full planting instructions.)

These are small quibbles. On the whole, Pangea seems to have a large number of laudable eco-friendly practices in place and to be producing some very nice skin and bodyare products.

Where to buy:

Shop online at Pangea's own website or through other e-tailers like Amazon.com.

Prefer to try before you buy? Use the Pangea Store Locator to find a retailer near you.

Review of New Cleaning Products at Eco Child's Play

Happy Summer Solstice!

Looking for the dirty secrets on the latest eco-friendly cleaning products to hit the market?

Scurry over to Eco Child's Play to get the goods.

(Despite the name, the site apparently has no relation to the 1988 horror movie Child's Play about a killer doll named Chucky. Although maybe a 2010 remake could have a Chucky doll made out of sustainably-harvested wood? Or a flexible bamboo Chucky? Got to go call my agent...)

Eco-Travel - Nashville (Hutton Hotel, aloft Nashville-Cool Springs)

View of Tennessee State Capitol from Nashville's Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park

Last month, I had the pleasure of taking a trip to Nashville, Tennessee. What a fun place! From its beautiful countryside and charming residents to the thriving music scene, Nashville makes an excellent, affordable vacation destination.

But how about from an eco-travel perspective? Well, I didn't have time to bike around Nashville, but I did see quite a few bike lanes and they were getting some use by the locals.

My initial assessment is that the existing bike paths will need to be expanded and connected to give Nashville a true alternative to car commuting, but the city is compact enough that a better bike infrastructure could make Nashville a wonderful biking city. Nashville does have a Strategic Plan to create an integrated bikeway network, so hopefully the system will become more comprehensive in the years ahead.

I didn't have a chance to ride public transit either, but the uncrowded buses seemed to run pretty frequently.

There is no light rail within Nashville, but a rail line (the Music City Star) recently started service from Nashville to points east. The downtown Nashville station looked spiffy and new.

(For what it's worth, I don't think it would make financial or logistical sense for a city the size of Nashville to put in light rail, but a trolley system of the sort prevalent in Vienna or Prague could work quite well here.)

Bamboo-filled lobby at Hutton Hotel (photo via hotel website)

Eco-travelers have a couple of exciting options in terms of lodging when visiting Nashville. Right near Vanderbilt University and convenient to Downtown is the Hutton Hotel, which just opened earlier this year. The Hutton has some serious eco credentials having just hosted the North American Summit of former Vice President Al Gore's Climate Project.

Built inside the completely gutted and renovated shell of a former office building, the Hutton is chock full of eco-friendly amenities. For instance, the lobby and guestrooms use bamboo flooring and furniture. Interior and exterior lighting uses energy-efficient LED and compact fluorescent fixtures. Remarkable Kone EcoDisc elevators use a low-friction, gearless design to reportedly achieve 70% energy savings over traditional elevators.

Dual flush toilets in the guestrooms (designed by a local company called Baden Bath) and waterless urinals in the public restrooms help save water. Soap dispensers in the guest rooms cut down on the use of plastic bottles.

Hutton employs the key card system prevalent in Europe where guests must insert a card into a slot when entering their guestroom in order to active the room's lights. When guests take their card on exiting the room, the lights automatically shut off 30 seconds later, saving even more energy.

Meanwhile, the hotel's restaurant 1808 Grille has gotten rave reviews in the local press. The restaurant has made a commitment to serve locally-produced wines and beers and Whole Trade coffee (from Allegro Coffee Company, which also provides organic tea bags in the Hutton's guest rooms). I believe the restaurant also places an emphasis on sustainable seafood and using organic ingredients when possible. Some of the restaurant's furnishings involve the use of reclaimed wood, saving natural resources.

While it's certainly possible to walk from the Hutton to Vanderbilt and even to Downtown Nashville, the Hutton also offers a hybrid courtesy car for use within 3 miles of the hotel. That 3 mile range easily covers trips to the convention center and nightlife in the downtown District.

Meanwhile, for Nashville visitors who prefer a bit of distance from the downtown hubbub, the Aloft-Nashville Cool Springs hotel located about 20 minutes south of the city offers another good eco-friendly option.

Owned by Starwood and associated with the W Hotel brand, Aloft Cool Springs has a number of eco-friendly touches including the use of cork building materials, sustainably-sourced wood venees and in-shower soap and shampoo dispensers (cutting down on the use of disposable plastic bottles). Various online sources indicate that Aloft hotels use biodegradable, eco-friendly cleaning products both within the rooms and on the hotels' pools.

If you do choose to stay at the Aloft Cool Springs, you'll be right nearby the town of Franklin, recently honored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a 2009 Distinctive Destination.

One more note for bicyclists - the area near Nashville is home to the northern terminus of the Natchez-Trace Parkway, a 444-mile road maintained by the National Park service that offers a beautiful and relatively safe bicycling option from middle Tennessee to the far Southwestern corner of Mississippi. We wanted to bike a little bit of the Parkway, but ended up only having about 30 minutes to drive a tiny piece of the road. In that time, we saw only about five cars and an equal number of bicyclists. Seems like a lovely route for long-distance cyclists.

PS - Nashville has a great zoo that helps spearhead conservation efforts for endangered animals like the clouded leopard. In addition, I was surprised and pleased to find out that zoo's cafeteria  has eschewed petroleum-based plastics in favor of renewable and biodegradable plates, cups and utensils made from such materials as sugarcane, corn and potato! Handy signs (like the one pictured in the unfortunately dark photo above) explain to zoo visitors that all plates/cups/utensils are compostable, biodegradable and designed to 'return to nature' in 45-60 days. Pretty cool.

Compaq Presario CQ2009F Desktop PC

Compaq's energy-efficient CQ2009F desktop computer

There are lots of websites that will talk about the exciting scientific research moving forward on powering our homes with fuel made from algae or other exotic substances.

Hey, I like algae as much as the next guy, but in the meantime, we get most of our energy from 'dirty' sources like oil, coal and nuclear.

So...what really gets me in a tizzy is when manufacturers makes quantum leaps forward in terms of efficiency, materials and affordability.

My last desktop computer was a Compaq. I bought it around late 2001 or early 2002. I spent around $1000 on it. It weighed approximately 27 lbs and (as I found out when I reviwed the Kill-a-Watt last year) used between 70-109 watts of electricity.

That old Compaq performed admirably for a while, even if it did look clunky and take up a significant chunk of my workspace. But then it started suddenly turning itself on and off without warning. And this thing was loud. It's not fun to be wakened in the middle of the night by the giant 'whoosh/click/whirrr' of your computer coming to life.

I had two choices - hire a computer exorcist or buy a new machine.

After looking high and low, I surprised myself by settling on another Compaq.

Compaq doesn't get much respect these days. Businesses are focused on brands like Dell and Lenovo. The hipsters all love their Apples or maybe their Acer eee box.

But I think the Compaq CQ2009F surpasses them all. Here's what I like:

1. Energy efficiency. My old desktop needed 70-109 watts of electricity. As measured by the Kill-a-Watt, the CQ2009F so far seems to draw only 29-32 watts no matter what it's doing. That's an efficiency improvement of approximately 60-70 percent!

2. Size/materials. As mentioned, my old desktop weighed approximately 27 lbs and took up a massive amount of desk space. The CQ2009F is much smaller (4.41" x 10.71" x 9.69"). It weighs only 7 lbs and requires much less space on the desk. That's a 74 percent weight reduction! So this desktop obviously needs much less in the way of raw materials - and since those raw materials tend to be made of plastic (oil) or metal, less is certainly better from an environmental standpoint.

3. Noise pollution. The CQ2009F is much quieter and unobtrusive than my old machine. Less noise pollution is always a good thing.

4. Features. Energy efficient machines are always great, but they're especially impressive when their feature set matches what other machines can do. In this case, I really wanted the ability to read and burn DVDs. The Asus eee box and some of the other tiny desktops don't have any DVD/CD drive, but the CQ2009F has one built in. It also has a handy little card reader so I can take the SD card right from my digital camera and plug it into the desktop without worrying about finding a USB cable.

5. Design. Remember when PCs used to be boring beige or grey boxes? The CQ2009F is sleek and sexy, slightly curvaceous, but not outrageous.

6. Price. It's nice when someone builds a great eco-friendly product, but if that product is out of reach for all buy a few millionaires (i.e. the Tesla electric car), then the practical environmental benefit is minimal. What's so beautiful about the CQ2009F is that it costs less than $300 (not including monitor)! That's a very competitive price these days and far less than I paid for a much less efficient machine just 7-8 years ago.

Why would anyone in the market for a desktop PC buy any other machine? I can think of just a few reasons:

- You're a serious gamer or video producer and need more RAM/power for your PC. (The CQ2009F has plenty of juice for typical home word processing and Internet browsing, but probably not enough for heavy gaming or video editing.)

- You want the smaller size and more efficient energy use (20 watts, according to Asus) of the eee box and you don't care about having the DVD drive.

- You're a Mac user, in which the Mac mini is probably your best eco-friendly bet (as discussed on Metaefficient).

Incidentally, the Dell Studio Hybrid also looks like a good eco-friendly option for PC fans, but it is a bit more pricey than the Compaq CQ2009F and according to the same Metaefficient article, a bit more power-hungry (26-44 watts).

Where to buy:

You can purchase the Compaq CQ2009F through various only retailers including Compaq's own website ($279.99 with free shipping) and Amazon.com ($269.99 with free shipping).