Your sophisticated television can raise your electricity bill – cnnespanol.com

(CNNMoney) – The ultra high-definition televisions reproduce sharper and vibrant images … but can also increase electricity use and your bill for this service

televisions -a UHD which sometimes also referred to as 4K- can display four times the resolution of current HD displays

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the new 4K TVs also use 30% more electricity than HD models on average, according to a report by the Defense Council Natural Resources (NRDC, for its acronym in English) released Tuesday.

“invoices residential energy Americans could increase more than 1,000 million dollars per year if all TVs over 36 inches to become 4K with the average efficiency of today”, said the report.

in a year, that would translate to 80,000 million kilowatt hours (kWh) additional electricity consumption … or three times the amount of electricity used by households in San Francisco .

from an environmental perspective, this would mean an additional issue of 4.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year.

“the potential impacts on national energy by transition to 4K TVs are profound, “the report said.

so why 4K current TVs use as much power over?

contrary to what some may think, the increased size of the television screen is not necessarily a factor in energy use.

the report said the main reason is because of its taillights, which need to be brighter in order to produce more vivid images on screens with more pixels. Currently, most high-definition televisions have a resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels. The UHD TVs have resolutions of 3,840 by 2,160 pixels.

Another major concern that arises is the power needed to display video encoding with high dynamic range processing. The HDR technology combines multiple images together and take the best parts of each to produce a final image. Many cameras, including iPhones, have this feature.

For video, the HDR technology is producing images that look as realistic as possible by viewing a wide range of brightness levels and contrast.

in one case, the feature alone increases energy use by 47%.

in newer UHD televisions, features like Wi-Fi and quicker restart also require more power.

“the good news is that the technology exists to prevent most of this increase in energy consumption,” they said. “Some of the most efficient models of televisions 4K on the market today use little or no more energy than that used by HD televisions of similar size”.

However, energy consumption 4K varies widely among models at this time.

the difference between 4K TV more energy efficient and less efficient can mean an extra $ 246 on an electricity bill over 10 years .. . the average life of a television.

for this study, the NRDC and colleagues tested 20 LCD TVs and OLED 1 television with a range from 49 to 55 inches. These included models manufactured by LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp and Sony in 2014 and 2015

For people who already have a 4K TV, the report has some recommendations to reduce energy consumption. Activate automatic brightness control, turn on the restart options “quick start” and avoid the use of video game consoles to stream movies online.

they sold each year 40-45 million new televisions and about 5 million of them are UHD. The NRDC says he expects this number to grow “exponentially”.