When it comes to TVs, there are specifications and there are specifications. By which I mean that there are 'factual' specifications you can rely on, and 'fatuous' specifications used to make one TV look better than the rest no matter how dubiously they may have been measured.

The factual specifications are actually rather few and far between; probably just native resolution and screen size, in fact. Which means that more often than not the only apparent on-paper differences between various TVs come down to the fatuous ones. As a result it’s easy to understand why manufacturers might want to make these figures look as impressive as they can irrespective of how impossible to achieve in real-world conditions they might be. But that doesn’t make the practice any less annoying.

In fact, it seems to me that the situation has now got so silly that it’s actually made quoting some specifications, most notably viewing angles and contrast ratios, pretty much pointless.

A 176 degree viewing angle? Not likely!

Let’s start with viewing angles. You will now find practically every flat TV claiming a viewing angle of 176-178 degrees. Which, by my maths, means that you’re supposed to be able to watch it from practically a right angle to the left or right.

In real world conditions, however, this claim is usually utter cobblers. With the vast majority of LCD screens, you’ll be lucky if you can view the screen from anything more than 30-40 degrees off axis before the picture loses so much colour saturation and contrast that it becomes nigh-on unwatchable. That adds up to a real world viewing angle of just 60-80 degrees – far short of the figures claimed by the manufacturers.

To be fair, the viewing angle situation is rather better with plasma technology; you really can watch plasma pictures from pretty wide angles before the picture degrades too badly. But if anything that just makes the claims by LCD screens all the more cheeky, as they’re obviously just trying to appear on a par with plasma in this pretty important picture area even when they’re actually not even in the same ball park.