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Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

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Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#21

Post by mgraczyk »

jreese wrote: post #15
aluminussoma wrote: post #7

I would only be surprised if the other manufacturers are NOT doing the same. We (collectively speaking) do the same at work. We optimize for what gets us promoted rather than what benefits the company. Companies optimize for revenue rather than a good user experience. This behavior of trying to game/cheat the benchmarks is entirely consistent with human behavior in other areas of life.

One of the best parts of being happy at a "terminal level" in FAANG is that I can easily pick what I work on for best impact on the teams around me (and the engineering org as a whole) without worrying about chasing a promotion. I know the levers I can pull to get a higher perf rating here and there, but I'm also free to focus on the "papercuts" knowing that I'm not sacrificing future promotions, because I just don't…

But then you get paid less money.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#22

Post by cmeacham98 »

waiwai933 wrote: post #9
haunter wrote: post #2

Never stop recommending https://www.rtings.com/ They cover more and more gadgets but they still do the best TV reviews

I generally use Wirecutter for my reviews -- anyone able to, um, compare and review the two?

Wirecutter is (in my opinion) enough for getting a "good enough" recommendation for a low-budget purchase where there isn't much difference across offerings. I used them when I bought a powerline adapter set to make sure the product worked roughly as advertised.

rtings, on the other hand, offers much more in-depth reviews. I've used them to decide on monitors, TVs, and higher-end headphone purchases so far and their reviews were excellently detailed and accurate.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#23

Post by waiwai933 »

onionisafruit wrote: post #10
waiwai933 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally use Wirecutter for my reviews -- anyone able to, um, compare and review the two?

Just poke around rtings.com and you’ll see the difference. It reminds me a bit of what wirecutter was in it’s pre-nyt days before it became a click generator.

I have done in the past, but I'm not sure what to make of the differences - let's take wireless keyboards as I'm currently thinking about getting one. If we look at Rtings[1], the first one it recommends is the Logitech MX Keys. On the Wirecutter[2], it first recommends the Logitech K380. To be clear, I've only skimmed both reviews right now.

Both go on to recommend the other's first choice as a good alternative pick (the primary difference being whether compact or full-size is better for most people). So that tells me for at least one specific category, they're in agreement.

Does Rtings go into a lot more detail about each keyboard? Absolutely. But that isn't necessarily useful to me--part of the reason I use the Wirecutter is so that I don't end up spending days trying to find the perfect item in a category[3]. I read the review, seeing if there are any caveats for its top pick that matter to me, and make a choice based on that.

So what I don't want to do when buying something that both review is to read through both reviews, because either: (A) they agree, like on the wireless keyboard, in which case I've wasted a little bit of time, but in the grand scheme of things, it's fine, or (B) they disagree, because now I'm tempted to go through and weigh each detailed point which is something I'm trying to avoid!

[1]: https://www.rtings.com/keyboard/reviews/best/by-type/wireles... [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-bluetoot... [3]: https://xkcd.com/1036/

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#24

Post by saxonww »

haunter wrote: post #2

Never stop recommending https://www.rtings.com/ They cover more and more gadgets but they still do the best TV reviews

It's a good site, but be aware that they don't cover all the TV brands on the market. I don't see Philips or Panasonic on there, for example. The site is based in Quebec and I wonder if they are only reviewing sets that are available in Canada.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#25

Post by jiggawatts »

Ocha wrote: post #13

Not surprised Samsung doing it. They consistently over promise and under deliver. I remember when buying their SSDs they promised support for HW encryption in future firmware update (Opal2/eDrive if I remember correctly) but they never actually delivered it. Since then I don’t trust anything Samsung promises or says.

They still market this feature today, even though it is dead in the water.

Hardware encryption was implemented so poorly that Microsoft said “enough is enough”, and simply dropped all such features from BitLocker.

It is impossible to enable this feature on any supported version of Windows.

(The straw that broke the camel’s back was apparently some vendors using “all zeroes” as the master encryption key.)

Samsung should be charged with false advertising.

If I wasn’t too lazy I would report them to the ACCC.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#26

Post by icod »

I'm totally done with Samsung. Their TVs are overpriced and bad, their phones add undeletable bloatware, remove useful stuff like headphone/mic jack, have low battery life and capacity and they force you to buy the flagship model, if you don't you'll receive a really small battery that even in the flagship model is not large enough. If you don't buy Galaxy series you won't even be able to mirror output via USB. And software support is really short. Even if the hardware works, they want you to buy a new phone 5 years later.

Likewise their TV OS is subpar and region locked, not that Android is any better or the other OSes.

All the TVs right now are really bad and not worth the money. My price limit was 600€. I ordered 4 TVs and returned them all, the worst was a "TCL" TV which had such a weak CPU that it couldn't even decode a 2MB/s SD stream.

Recently Samsung had a bad batch of SSDs and they sold them via Amazon and despite them knowing that the batch was bad it wasn't pulled, instead they lowered the price. One guy bought 8 , 5 died and 2 were in spare mode and despite them being from the same batch the refused to replace the 2. Imagine buying a 4TB SSD, copying your stuff over from the old HDD to have it die 2 months later.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#27

Post by prawn »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #18

The whole concept of benchmarking a TV set sounds like something from a dystopian science fiction milieu.

Why's that? Wouldn't there be practical things to measure like picture quality, colour consistency, power usage, speaker quality, etc?

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#28

Post by Gigachad »

jiggawatts wrote: post #25
Ocha wrote: post #13

Not surprised Samsung doing it. They consistently over promise and under deliver. I remember when buying their SSDs they promised support for HW encryption in future firmware update (Opal2/eDrive if I remember correctly) but they never actually delivered it. Since then I don’t trust anything Samsung promises or says.

They still market this feature today, even though it is dead in the water. Hardware encryption was implemented so poorly that Microsoft said “enough is enough”, and simply dropped all such features from BitLocker. It is impossible to enable this feature on any supported version of Windows. (The straw that broke the camel’s back was apparently some vendors using “all zeroes” as the master encryption key.) Samsung shou…

Hardware encryption should never have been trusted in the first place since it’s impossible to audit. The completely obvious thing happened where it’s incompetently implemented.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#29

Post by LegitShady »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #17
verytrivial wrote: post #14

This sounds very similar to how various car manufacturers rigged their products to be benchmark aware. It did NOT turn out well for their shareholders.

Except this can't harm a single person, while Dieselgate's impact was estimated at dozens and dozens of people killed and hundreds injured.

>Except this can't harm a single person

of course it harmed people - people spent money on TV sets that do not perform as they expect because samsung was purposely cheating on the tests. All of their customers were potentially harmed, as well as Samsung's competitors.

Re: Samsung Busted for Cheating TV Test Benchmarks

#30

Post by oh_sigh »

aluminussoma wrote: post #16
jreese wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the best parts of being happy at a "terminal level" in FAANG is that I can easily pick what I work on for best impact on the teams around me (and the engineering org as a whole) without worrying about chasing a promotion. I know the levers I can pull to get a higher perf rating here and there, but I'm also free to focus on the "papercuts" knowing that I'm not sacrificing future promotions, because I just don't…

No you can't. Source: I, too, was at a terminal level at a FAANG.

Sure you can? You can even be a terminal L4 these days and just coast while getting paid like $250k/yr.
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