Nefarious Retailers Make Small TVs Look Bigger

Plucky New York Times reporter Matt Richtel made a shocking discovery: Big box retailers are exaggerating the screen size of certain televisions by as much as half an inch. The unanswered question: How dare they?

Best Buy, Circuit City, and other retailers have, under pressure from electronics companies like Toshiba, Sharp, and Sony, rounded the size of some television screens up to a more marketable number. A rogue 31.5″ television might be harder to market, but a family-friendly, round number like 32″ brings out the wallets.

Now, Best Buy clearly states these rounded numbers as “32″ Class,” and if you think that’s totally reasonable, you’d be disagreeing with Richtel. Apparently he’s even heard rumblings of a class-action lawsuit to presumably regain those lost inch fragments. A Sony representative stated that the lesser size is due to unspecific manufacturing concerns, but if that doesn’t sound like a hasty coverup of a conspiracy of massive proportions, I don’t know what does. [NYTimes]