Best Buy and the value of consumer education

Best Buy (and other companies too on occasion) will sometimes resort to slightly unsavory tactics to upsell certain services that aren’t always necessary for customers who wish to educate themselves a little bit. In this case, the service involved is a HDTV calibration service that costs a fair bit that Best Buy (at least some of them anyway) are using rather sneaky tactics to sell the service to unsuspecting, uninformed consumers.

A tipster and a report on Gizmodo caught a local Best Buy running a side-by side comparison display which showed the difference between a calibrated and an non-calibrated HDTV. No big deal, right?

After further examination, it was discovered one was hooked up with component cables while the clearer TV had HDMI. The big deal about this is, component cable is analog and won’t display 1080p in some cases due to copy protection; you need HDMI to display this resolution. It could have explained the difference in image quality, and comparing systems set up the same way is the best and most honest way to show th differences with a purely internal calibration service like this.

To defend yourself against this sort of thing, get educated. This article off Gizmodo that we profiled earlier shows you how to calibrate your TV yourself, and it only takes 5-10 minutes to do. This is a practice that (at those stores anyway) probably won’t change, so make sure you go in and be informed about your choices and what you need to do to get the best out of your HDTV.