If you want my money, show me your sexy back!

Okay, so I moved across the pond from good ol' Europe to California (expect a separate blog post about that). While I'm bringing some stuff with me, I am in the business of buying a lot of new stuff, namely a TV and Amplifier (among others). While browsing through the endless number of available components, I was reminded again of the inability of marketing departments to appeal to us geeks: Many companies have 3 or 4 pictures from the front, but none of the back of their items!

Really, why is that? I was looking at a TV, and I want to know if I can connect my equipment and I needed one with RCA Audio Outputs to go into my stereo amplifier. I'm not a big fan of digging through walls of text (often incomplete) describing the in- and outputs, often using different terminology. I want two things. First, I want this:

This is a picture of the connectors on the Sharp LC-52LE700UN, the TV I have on my wish-list now. From this picture, I can see it has everything I want. So the second thing I want is a link to the PDF of the User Manual so that I can double check that there are no caveats.

There are dozens of companies trying to sell their stuff. Amazon listed over 100 TVs when I searched for my criteria. How am I supposed to find the one which has what I need? By looking at the connectors! By simply looking at this, I can already remove many candidates from the list. For the remaining ones, I can then read the User's Manual to see which suits me best.

Yes, I realize that style is a big sales factor, and I'm not saying that pictures from the front/sides are unimportant. But on the other hand: As a geek, I get more excited when I see a battery of connections. Seriously, leave that shiny black high-gloss coating to the ladies and instead show me RCA sockets!

The same goes for audio equipment, and here even more as some amplifiers have shared inputs or a separate phono input. I was looking for a cheap Stereo Amplifier as I still had speakers but no Amp, and I ended up with the Sony STR-DH100 primarily because of the clear back shot and available user manual, and only then I started reading the reviews.

Remember companies: There are dozens, sometimes hundreds of products available in a category, and as a customer I want to be able to remove all but 5 or 6 of them ASAP, so that I can take a real in-depth look at those remaining. So do me a favor and show me your backs.

Love, Michael.