It's 315 again, and the talk of the "quality" of consumer goods in the streets and alleys is also increasing significantly. Among them, as the "second largest piece" in home audiovisual consumption, "second only to traditional color TV", the home projection market, this year's "discussion" is particularly lively.
Since 2018, the domestic home projection market has achieved excellent results for four consecutive years, with an annual sales volume increase of one million units. The industry is expected to usher in the fifth "Million Year" incremental year in 2022. The achievement of 5 million+ sales in the domestic market in 2021 also allows the scale of projection home large screens to touch more than 10% of the home audiovisual equipment and color TV industry for the first time.
"The amount is large, and the problems that have not been paid much attention to before will be magnified!" Industry insiders said that the increase in home investment, especially the rapid growth, on the one hand, led to uneven products and brands in the market, on the other hand, it also led to a significant increase in the scale of "rights protection consumers". At the same time, the magnified "problem surface" has also attracted more and more attention from the industry, and continues to promote and spur the progress and development of the industry.
The attention of the "problem" of home investment consumption has increased
According to media reports and analysis, the quality of home projection has been a "key care" product of the market supervision department in recent years. However, from the market supervision sampling data, the current unqualified rate of sampling has dropped significantly compared with 5 years ago: the unqualified rate has dropped from more than 20% to more than 10%.
For example, in May 2021, the State Administration for Market Regulation organized a state supervision and spot check on the quality of 38 products, including cashmere knitwear. Among them, 26 batches of projector products produced by 24 enterprises in 7 provinces (cities) were randomly inspected, and 4 batches of products were found to be unqualified, and the unqualified discovery rate was 15.4%. Earlier this year, the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Market Supervision conducted a special quality supervision and sampling inspection of 20 batches of projector products produced by 20 brands, and a total of 2 batches of unqualified products were detected, and the sampling failure rate in this period was 10%.
Compared with the recent unqualified rate of 10-15% in these sampling results, Consumer Report has sorted out the sampling results of 229 batches of projector products from 2015 to 2021 by the national, provincial and municipal market supervision and administration bureaus, of which 52 batches are not up to standard, and the draw non-compliance rate is as high as 22.71% - that is, with the passage of time, the compliance rate of projection sampling inspection is significantly improved.
Among them, unqualified products appear more on monolithic LCD models. Single-chip LCD models in the home projection market have long occupied more than half of the share, and mainly focus on the low-price and low-end market, which is the hardest hit area with high product quality problems. Some netizens joked that "single-chip LCD projection has greatly reduced the quality draw value of four major technical types of products such as DLP projection, single-chip LCD projection, three-chip LCD projection, and LCOS projection with its own strength." In recent years, the decline in the unqualified rate of industry products in market sampling is also closely related to the decline in the proportion of the single-chip LCD projection market and the increase in the proportion of prominent high-value products in its product sales.
With the expansion of the market scale, consumers' awareness of product quality has also been significantly enhanced, which has promoted the overall improvement of quality control in the industry - however, from more than 20%, or even 30% of the products in the early market, to the current unqualified rate has dropped to more than 10%, which is obviously not enough. Industry experts said that the progress of the market is obvious to all, but the future improvement space is still "obvious to all"!
For example, the first three digits in the sampling question form are: power terminal disturbance voltage, radiation exceedance, light output, etc. Among them, the light output is the most core technical indicator for consumers to buy a projector: brightness. In this regard, the industry market norms have improved significantly from 2020 - previously, the vague concept of "light source brightness" that is widely used has been increasingly abandoned, becoming a very small number of brands that are still applying the "right to speak". This also makes the home investment market, especially the single-chip LCD projector, often seven or eight thousand, or even tens of thousands of lumens of brightness data greatly reduced, and become one or two hundred or three hundred or five hundred lumens of "imaging output brightness".
Whether it is the results of sampling, or the feedback and comments on the consumer side, it constitutes a positive pressure on the industry. However, with the current market size of home investment products, the existing product qualification rate is still difficult to be satisfactory: especially in the context of the lack of national hard product standards for home investment products, the "testing items and means" of sampling inspection can reflect the "problems" of industry product quality, which has become a "weak point" for further development of the industry.
There are many checked out and unchecked problems
Power terminals harass voltage, radiation exceeds the standard, these two are the most common sampling unqualified items", industry insiders pointed out that the emergence of these two problems, the root cause is "low distribution of electrical components, less distribution", rather than design or manufacturing problems.
From the market side, the high incidence of such problems is a single-chip LCD projection, especially hundreds of yuan models: hundreds of yuan of projectors, both imaging, but also have audio and intelligent functions, manufacturers can only "violently" control product costs. Quality problems on the product side are difficult to avoid. Industry insiders pointed out that considering the coverage of sampling and the market structure in which such products rely heavily on network sales and many small and medium-sized brands, the product problems in the actual market are estimated to be higher than the unqualified rate reflected in the sampling inspection.
However, in addition to the above routine electrical inspection items, as well as brightness, resolution and other options that manufacturers have clear parameter commitments, there are many "common consumer complaint items" in the home investment market, especially single-chip LCD models:
For example, the question of product noise. The main models in the home investment market are divided into monolithic LCD models and DLP models. The difference in the brightness of the light source is as much as three or four times the difference in efficiency — and the excess light is converted into heat dissipation. This actually makes the heat dissipation requirements of single-chip LCD models with the same projection brightness significantly higher than that of DLP models. The price of single-chip LCD models in the market is generally low, which further compresses the space for higher quality cooling systems. Many factors have led to the heat dissipation noise of monolithic LCD models becoming a major consumer complaint hotspot.
For example, the performance defects of optical lenses are also the hot spots of problems for single-chip LCD models: the size of the liquid crystal light valve of single-chip LCD models is often relatively large, and the caliber of the project lens required is also larger. At the same time, the low price of such products determines the complexity of the optical structure used in the lens and the quality of the material, which must strictly control the cost. Coupled with the possible interference of the installation and transportation process, some products will have optical obstacles such as the sharpness of the edges or the lack of sharpness on one side after the focus of the new machine; the old machine is out of focus, the focus is inaccurate and other optical obstacles.
Of course, in addition to the actual product quality problems, there is also a "gap" between "expectations" and "product quality" in the home investment market, as well as consumer complaints caused by insufficient understanding of product performance. In this regard, whether it is a cheap machine of seven or eight hundred yuan or more than 10,000 yuan of laser TV products, there have been appearances.
Among them, insufficient brightness of the picture, insufficient contrast, and poor effect under lighting conditions are the main causes of consumer complaints. For example, the author has contacted a complaint about a laser TV: the consumer only purchased a laser TV host, mistakenly thinking that it can be used as a color TV, the result is that the picture contrast is insufficient, and the picture of directly projecting the white wall without pulling the curtain does not meet the requirements of consumers. In the "bad review" of the e-commerce platform's home investment, the single-chip LCD model is a large number of complaints of "insufficient brightness and lack of clarity" - this is related to the low brightness model itself, the projection brightness varies between 150-700 lumens, and it is also related to the exaggerated publicity and misleading consumers on the brightness of the manufacturer, and it is also related to the excessive expectations of consumers for hundreds of yuan and thousands of yuan products.
At the same time, among consumer complaints about the poor picture quality of the projector, many of the "original intentions" of insufficient clarity and brightness are "insufficient contrast" - that is, the interference of ambient light on the imaging contrast under bright light. This is related to the lack of consumer understanding and understanding of the projector imaging process, resulting in excessive expectations and errors in the understanding of the use environment. Similarly, many consumers do not have sufficient understanding of the value and significance of anti-light curtains: but this point has been improved in 2021 with the popular application of high-brightness smart home investment products.
Many quality and quality problems cannot be covered and exposed through sampling, and it is also impossible to simply divide responsibility by who is right and who is wrong: the problems in the projector market are the result of a combination of reasons. In this context, industry insiders believe that "opportunities and challenges coexist"!
Opportunities under the chaos of home investment consumption and projection quality
For the projector consumer market, for a long time, various "problems and drawbacks", the author believes that it is mainly caused by "structural" factors.
On the one hand, the home investment market has always pursued cheaper products. This forms an "inherent conflict" with the quality of the product. For example, a few hundred yuan of projectors also want intelligent functions, intelligent voice, obviously its CPU, memory and other aspects will not have the speed of high-end smart phones, there are some application obstacles, system crashes, caton is difficult to avoid. Some netizens said that the intelligent voice function "suddenly 'makes a sound' when watching ghost movies, which is really scary." But these problems were basically absent five or six years ago, because most cheap models did not have smart features at that time.
In fact, in the scale of 10 years, the market share of single-chip LCD models has dropped sharply, which is also an important reason for the improvement of the product compliance rate and the decline in the complaint rate of the home investment industry in the past two years. However, with the sinking of home investment from the first- and second-tier city market to the fourth- and fifth-tier cities, county towns, and town markets, as well as the innovative development of single-chip LCD models with more than 1,000 yuan, the market share of single-chip LCD models will rise again after the second half of 2021, and further affect the future development trend of quality control reputation in the home investment market.
On the other hand, the brand structure of the home investment market is relatively special. In particular, the competition logic established in the early monolithic LCD market is not based on brand reputation and premium, but on e-commerce channel investment and product marketing capabilities. ——On this product, there have really been "weird operations" such as "Cosmic Brand Cigarettes". Single-chip LCD models have low brand loyalty, chaotic market competition, different standards, coupled with the long-term pursuit of low prices for products, resulting in many "quality control" quality deficiencies.
In particular, between the DLP model and the monolithic LCD model, the home investment market has formed a "quality gap". The overall quality of the DLP models with the main product price of more than 1500 yuan is far better than the single-chip LCD models whose overall price is generally less than 1700 yuan. It constitutes a typical example of the structured pattern of "problems and ills" of product quality in the home investment market.
Where a structured market is, it means 'potential opportunity'. "Since 2021, several rookie brands have emerged in the monolithic LCD projection market: by improving the transparency of product parameters, compressing and exaggerating publicity, and improving product configuration, the "brand quality reputation" brand has been played in the cheap home investment market with more than 1000+ prices and 250-500 lumens. Even some monolithic LCD model brands have begun to bid farewell to the industrial chain structure that simply relies on OEM/ODM, and have begun to develop optical machines and improve the core technology content, with the intention of rising in the chaotic world. At the same time, the DLP model further lowers the starting price of the market, seizes the price of 1500-2000 yuan, and promotes the improvement of the quality of low-priced home investment products.
At present, the home investment market, which has achieved 5 million new players every year, must not be hovering on low-level competition forever! In fact, in 2021, more than one million of the 5 million units in the market are "high-end products" with a projection brightness of more than 1,000 lumens and a price of about 3,500 yuan or more. ——Consumers' appetite is getting higher and higher, and the quality of home investment must be improved. This is an opportunity for head enterprises, but also an opportunity for emerging entrepreneurs, and it will be a disaster for "vested interests in yesterday's low-quality products" who adhere to the "low-level competition logic".
In summary, on the 315 Consumer Rights Day, looking back at the development of the home investment market, we can not only see the huge business opportunities and potential growth space in the market; we can also see the fact that the quality of the industry's products has been greatly improved over the years; more importantly, we can see that there is still a big gap between the home investment products and the market and the real full satisfaction of consumers... The deceased has been lost, the comers can be traced: strive to improve the quality of home investment, especially the quality of entry-level products, and use rigid quality control to establish a fortress of brand reputation, and the industry is still promising.