When I lived in China, I owned two televisions, both made by Chinese electronic companies and exclusively(as far as I know) for the Chinese market.
Anyway, they both had a feature I have not seen on my American/Japanese made TV’s. They had a power button up on the set itself. It pushed in, and when it was in, you could use the remote to turn it on and off. If the button was not pushed in, the TV was “off off”, meaning even the remote could not turn it on.
What was the point of this? We just pushed the button in, left the “main power button” on forever, and used the remote to turn it on and off.
I guessed that this was to stop the TV from power sucking during the night. I had heard that TV’s still draw slight power even when “off”. Perhaps turning it “off off” stopped this?
Anyone know? It might have even been Chinese law to make it like this; I have no idea.
Instant-on circuitry uses power to keep part of the TV on at all times, so that when you hit the power button on the remote, the screen comes on quicker. When you push off the power button on the TV, it turns off the instant-on circuit, and saves power.
Saving electricity is not as important here in the US, so manufacturers nixed the extra button.
Sounds to me like it’s not an extra button – U.S. TV’s have a power button on the set and one on the remote – but a differently wired button. U.S. sets can be turned on or off by either button regardless of the postion of the other button.
Aren’t power buttons on modern devices just relays? So the relay that’s energized by pressing the button on the TV and the relay that’s energized by pressing the button on the remote both independently actuate the actual (internal) power switch, right?
This. Many consumers in China try to use as little electricity as possible to keep costs down. The main power button is a switch that disconnects all power to the TV.
Turning this switch on, allows this IR receiver to function and you can then use the remote.
Most CRT TV’s in Ireland and the UK had this setup, with a button on the TV set working a real mechanical switch to completely cut the power, with a secondary “Standby” button on the remote. However, I haven’t seen it on any LCD or LED sets.
The reason is that TV sets without this arrangement draw power even when they’re “Off” as they need to keep sensors active to watch for the IR signal from the remote to turn them on.
I’ve seen similar switches on American TVs back from the 70s and/or 80s. Usually, it was on the back of the TV or hidden behind a panel on the front along with the Vert, Tint, Color, etc. knobs and did one of two things. It either acted like the switch on an outlet strip and cut all power, or it disabled the “preheat” on the CRT filament, in which case, it may have been labeled as “Instant On.” The extra master power switch proved to be a bother as it could make the set appear to be completely dead if it was accidentally bumped by a kid or pet playing behind the TV. Conversely, it could be used by parents to enact some control over TV watching, but if the kids saw Mom or Dad reaching behind the TV, the ruse was over.
Even further back when vacuum tubes and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were TVs that had a back-panel switch that altered the behavior of the front-side power switch - either the tube filaments were all run at reduced power, or not at all. The TV would stay mostly “warmed up” with the filaments at low power, so it might take 15-30 seconds to come alive instead of a minute or two.
I don’t have two power buttons, but my TV in Japan has a similar feature. If I turn the power button off on the TV manually, the remote will not turn it back on. I have to go back and push the button again. Then the remote works just fine.
My wife and I were talking about this tonight. Basically, you could not turn the TV on without a remote, since the power button on the TV didn’t actually activate the TV; it just made it activate-able by the remote.
If the battery died in the remote or you lost it, you could not turn on the TV at all.
My NEC TV from the mid 80’s had this feature too. I would shut the main off when I went on vacation, as a courtesy to my landlord who paid the electric bills.