Date
Author
Виктория СОКОЛОВСКАЯ; Itoday Ru; -- Специально Для «Времени Новостей
Source
Preserved copy
Translated material
In retail chains
The tricks of those who sell equipment and the naivety of those who buy it
If this continues, manufacturers will come up with the idea of offering us TVs in the new 16:12 format instead of the usual 4:3. And someone will definitely fall for it. In any case, marketers’ slightly less blatant tricks work just fine.Most often, mobile phones fall under marketing “distribution”. It is clear why: we are talking about millions of dollars. Euroset alone sold 12.6 million phones with an average price of $201 in 2007. It sold not without the help of manufacturers who came up with “marketing ploys” of dubious nature. They use “200 hours of work”, “access to Odnoklassniki.ru” (option: Yandex.ru) or somewhere else “in one click”, “mirror surface of the case”. No one explains to the gullible buyer that the operating time of the phone in real conditions is one and a half to two times lower than stated, and you can only talk for two to three hours. For example, the operating time of the Sony Ericsson K790i phone promised on the manufacturer's website is up to 350 hours (14.6 days), while under normal conditions the charge lasts for three, maximum four days. It’s easy to access any site from a browser without overpaying to simplify the process, and the beautiful glossy plastic collects ugly fingerprints no worse than a fingerprint scanner.
A separate category of sales consists of counterfeit phones. Domestic sellers of Chinese counterfeits of Nokia and Sony Ericsson models honestly warn that they are selling counterfeits: on the Internet you can find many offers of counterfeits of Nokia N95 (“It looks like the real thing,” the sellers assure), which costs three to four times less than the original. But this does not prevent many, especially young people, from buying fakes in order to show off others (the method tested on Swiss watches works great in the pipe market). In this case, the buyer is deceiving himself. Fake Nokla and Soni Erikkson phones (yes, that’s right - an “inconspicuous” distortion of the name of the original) fail much earlier and more often than real ones, and the anonymous manufacturer, of course, does not provide a guarantee for them.
Mobile operators also contribute to the development of methods for relatively fair taking of money from the population. By prior agreement with the manufacturers of the so-called. “mobile content” they invite subscribers to download music and pictures supposedly for free (“you only pay for traffic”). But they are silent about the fact that a connection via WAP-GPRS is charged at a price of 2 to 5 rubles. for 10 kilobytes, and the average picture or melody will cost 100-150 KB. Keep this in mind when visiting wap.mts.ru, wap.megafonpro.ru and wap.beeline.ru.
Marketing tricks are also widely used to sell other products. The main characteristic of digital cameras is still the number of megapixels of the matrix - the device that “digitizes” the image during shooting. “In fact, “megapixel” is far from the main indicator of camera quality,” says professional photographer Tatyana Rudneva (Tekhnomir Publishing House). -- Physical size is much more important. The smaller the matrix, the less light hits it and the more defects there will be in the photo. Accordingly, the more pixels fit on the matrix, the worse the image quality.” Note that few professional digital cameras have the same matrix size as the exposed frame of film cameras - 24x36 mm. Amateur cameras usually have very small “matrices” - 5.8x4.3 mm or even smaller, and the optimal number of megapixels when shooting with such a camera is 3-5, and not 8-10 squeezed into it.
Various tricks are used when selling computers and laptops. So, when talking about monitors, sellers often mention response time - ten, eight or even two milliseconds, assuring you that this is very important in games and when watching movies. In fact, there are three tricks hidden in this phrase. First, two milliseconds is the time it takes to switch between black and white, while changing, say, shades of gray will take several times longer. Secondly, the human eye is not particularly fast, and its “response time” is on average 10-15 milliseconds, that is, it is not able to distinguish between monitors with six and two milliseconds of image update time. Finally, human fingers cannot react to these changes faster than the eye, and a loss of even a hundredth of a second will still occur - gamers who love “shooting games” should know this.
Fictitious advantages have long been “registered” inside the computer. To this day, some AMD Athlon and Sempron processors receive numerical designations that are 10-15% higher than the actual clock speed, for example 1700+ at 1500 MHz. The manufacturer, however, does not call these designations clock frequency, but the buyer gets exactly that impression. In addition, a high processor frequency does not mean that the computer will run faster. Performance depends on many factors: amount of RAM, operating system version, hard drive speed, etc. “Very often, unscrupulous sellers take advantage of the fact that the buyer is sometimes unfamiliar with the item being purchased. The seller focuses the buyer's attention on the processor frequency, and not on the consumer properties of the product. That’s why we tell customers not to ask about frequencies, but about the capabilities of the computer, which are really important from the consumer’s point of view,” agrees Andrey Kovalev from Formoza (computer equipment manufacturer).
The law protects us from gross deception by the manufacturer. It is prohibited to lie in product descriptions or terms of service. The manufacturer never lies in such a way that it can be proven in court. But this does not stop him from deceiving us. We can recommend only one rule: pay attention to the text in small print in the corner of the advertisement. And don’t be fooled by television advertising for “mobile content”—precisely because it’s basically impossible to read a note typed on the edge of the screen in a couple of seconds of showing the commercial.