Is this really a problem anymore? I have a five year old 50" plasma, and it draws 0.12 W in standby. That's not "excessive", it's a rounding error. It's 1 kWh per year, or roughly 0.6 kg of CO2; the same as idling your car for an extra 2 seconds every day.
Cable/satellite boxes also frequently draw multiple watts in standby or "off". If every bit of consumer electronics were as thrifty with standby as your TV, it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
(I'll add: my iPod Touch can "wake up" instantly when I interact with it after days sitting unplugged, and that's drawing from a tiny battery. Even 120 mW is far above the lower bound of what's necessary to build a complex device with fast wakeup upon user interaction.)
(Second edit: the power converter that started this discussion is obviously targeted at much lower power applications than even an iPod, so it's not really relevant to anything that can be plugged in at home.)
Just TVs, not monitors, not computers, not audio receivers, not game consoles, not microwave ovens, not etc. I doubt the cost of designing this converter even approaches the yearly cost of a power plant.
That explains why most newer LED lamps flash at 120 Hz, slomo mode fails on cameras, and one gets wierd strobing effects with fast moving stuff...
I wish they'd just use electrolytic caps and make the light output actually constant...
Yes. I hate it when LED light output isn't continuous or visibly flickery, especially when it's from LED lights that are on (or are visible from) moving objects -- such as LED taillights on automobiles or in-road lane lights. All the eye movement (or object movement) makes the flicker even more flagrant :(
I remember extremely flickery lane lights on the leftmost lane markers on the infamous SR 110, on the northbound direction in the tunnels (the ones right before the left-exit to I-5 north).
[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/taiyo-yuden/JMK325A...
Just learned a new phrase today.
But, I believe you're looking for "planned obsolescence." It's common in car manufacturing.
Excessive standby power consumption is a big problem. There are lots of devices, especially TVs, which consume far too much power when supposedly off. (Of course, some of them are constantly listening to you, phoning home, and possibly spying on you.)
One of the more important recent developments in switching power supplies is the elimination of electrolytic capacitors. They're the biggest point of failure. This is already happening in LED lightbulbs.[1][2] Electrolytic caps inside LED lamp units are the primary cause of failure. They only last about 10,000 to 20,000 hours, while high-output LEDs are good for 40,000 hours. If a power supply can be built with lower capacitance, ceramic capacitors can be used. That makes it possible to get the lifetime of all the power components above 100,000 hours, so the LEDs will burn out first.
[1] https://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/164083/1/Content.pdf [2] www.rle.mit.edu/per/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Chen-Electrolytic-Free.pdf