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 Hello!
I am Alfred Poor and I want to be the person
you turn to when you have questions about HDTV and
home entertainment. I’ve got the experience
and the skills to give you accurate
information in terms that you can understand.
And I’ve got a proven track record that you can
trust.
I spent more than 20 years writing reviews for
PC Magazine,
the most prestigious computer magazine in the world.
I was a Contributing Editor and Lead Analyst for
Business Displays for the magazine. Over the years,
I developed the rigorous testing protocols used at
PC Magazine to evaluate projectors and computer
monitors.
I’m also an internationally-recognized expert in the
display industry. I was a founding member and past
Chair of the
Society for Information Display’s
Display of the Year Awards Committee,
and I’m currently Chair of the Society’s Delaware
Valley chapter. I’ve also been a contributing editor
for the Society’s magazine, Information Display.
I’m also Senior Editor and a Senior Research
Associate with
Pacific Media Associates,
a leading market research firm in the large screen
display market, where I work on HDTV and related
issues.
I’m co-host of
The Personal Computer Show
on WBAI on Wednesday evenings at 8 PM Eastern, where
I help thousands of listeners on the radio and on
the Web with their computer problems. I know how
frustrating it can be to be faced with a technology
question and not know how to get a straight answer.
Listen to our show sometime if you get a chance —
you can hear it live or download archives of the
show from the Web site if you are interested — and
you’ll get a feel for how much I care about the
needs of our listeners.
After helping millions of readers make sense of the
personal computer industry over the past 20 years,
I’m now ready to help you make sense out of the
confusing HDTV market. You can count on me to
provide independent and expert
information that you can trust to help
you make smart choices about your home entertainment
purchases, and avoid expensive mistakes.
Alfred Poor
 For over 15 years, Alfred Poor has been one of the display industry's most knowledgeable and influential analysts and journalists. During his long tenure as a
Contributing Editor of PC Magazine he did a fabulous job of testing, evaluating, reviewing and writing about monitors, projectors and display technology. Alfred's writing has always been focused on the end user and consumer, so his HDTV website will be an important and useful resource for all."
Dr. Raymond Soneira
www.displaymate.com
 I've known Alfred Poor for years, and he is one of the few industry gurus who not only knows whereof he speaks, but can be counted on to give straight advice without sugar-coating.
Tom Holzel
www.velocityassociates.net
Boston, MA
How This Site Is
Funded:
The
most important content on this site is its
information, both on the pages you can access
here and in my publications that I offer for sale.
It takes a lot of time to put all this together, not
to mention the years of experience and learning it
takes to gather all that information in the first
place.
My
time is valuable, as is the time of the
highly-skilled Web experts I have helping me create
and maintain this site. We all could be using this
time to earn money in other projects, but we’ve
chosen to spend it here.
Our
time will be wasted unless we can deliver
high-quality information about HDTV and home
entertainment products and services, information
that is independent and expert,
information that you can trust
and use to make confident buying decisions.
So this is our primary purpose, and we don’t want to
let anything get in the way of that.
EARNING A FAIR RETURN
Still, we want to earn a fair return for the time
and other resources we put into creating and
maintaining this site and its products. One way to
do that is to ask you and other visitors to pay for
some of the information:
Professor Poor’s Guide to Buying HDTV.
If you were to hire me at my open consulting rate of
$1,500 a day to share with you the information
contained in just one of the guides, I’d have to
charge you thousands of dollars. You’d probably
still come out ahead, as some of the points I make
can save you that much or more on a single
HDTV purchase. And I can help you avoid wasting
many times that amount, by not making an expensive
mistake that you’ll have to live with for many
years.
But I
want to make this information available to many
people, and so it is important to me to keep the
price of the Guide series affordable.
The individual price is just a small fraction of a
percent of the time and effort that went into
creating each one. And that’s without considering
the costs of creating and maintaining this Web site,
and of researching and writing my daily posts in the
Almanac,
and of answering the thousands of visitor emails
that I receive.
So we
rely on other revenue sources to help fund
this site. I want you to understand these sources,
because this will help you understand where the
money comes from, which in turn will help you
judge for yourself whether the information I
provide here and in my Guide series is
independent, expert, and worthy of your
trust.
First
and foremost, you should understand that multiple
revenue streams are common in the Web and other
forms of publishing. Consider a typical magazine.
The cover price may be $5 or so, and the
subscription price may be half that or less. If
you’ve priced full-color printing lately, you’ll
know that it costs many times the cover price just
to print a copy of a typical magazine. Shipping and
postage are also expensive. How do the publishers
manage? They sell advertising space, because
advertisers are willing to pay to put their message
in front of the magazine’s readers.
Even
television shows and movies are relying on
advertisers to increase revenues. Product placement
has grown to be a major factor in entertainment
productions. When you can recognize the brand of
automobile or notebook computer or cell phone or
computer monitor in a scene, you can be fairly
certain that it was not by accident. Someone paid to
put that there, to promote the brand or the product
or both.
THREE OTHER REVENUE SOURCES
So I
want to be very clear about where the money comes
from for this site, and how brands and products
and services may be promoted. The revenues can come
from three major sources: Google ads, affiliate
programs, and banner ads.
Google ads:
these
are a familiar feature on many Web sites these
days, and they are added to the pages automatically
from a pool of advertisers. All the Google ads are
clearly marked, so you’ll know when you see them. We
don’t select the advertisers, and we have no control
over the content. The advertisers pay to place their
messages here because they want to reach a specific
audience. Like a topical magazine, visitors like you
are generally interested in a number of key topics,
and the advertisers target this site based on those
interests. So these ads are here because you’re
here. It is important to know that I do not endorse
or recommend any of these specific ads.
With
that said, I also encourage you to click on those
you find interesting. I don’t want to send you off
to other sites, but often I click on these ads
myself to find out more about what information,
products, and services they have to offer. We’ve
done our best to help you recognize these ads when
they appear on our pages, in the hope that you will
not confuse them with the original content that I
have written for this site.
Affiliate programs:
I personally select each one that is included on
this site. In the real world, a business has a
difficult time selling something to a customer until
the prospect walks through the store’s front door.
It’s
the same on the Web, and retailers will pay other
sites to send visitors their way. Sometimes they pay
just for the fact that a visitor was referred by a
specific site, and sometimes they pay the referring
site a commission on any sales that the visitor may
make. We do that with this site, too; maybe that’s
how you found us. We pay other sites for
sending visitors to our pages. (If you’re interested
in becoming part of our affiliate program,
send us an email.) But we also participate in
affiliate programs from other sites.
Here’s
our policy on affiliate programs. We put our
affiliate links on our various Resource Center
Links pages. We’ve got different pages for a
variety of HDTV and home entertainment topics. If
you use one of these links to access the sites
listed there, it may result in some revenues coming
back to us from that site. Not all the links on
those pages are to sites that have affiliate
programs. It is important for you to know that
all the links on those pages are for companies
that I endorse and recommend. In no case does
the possibility of affiliate revenues determine
whether or not a resource is listed on these pages.
Now,
I’m not guaranteeing that any dealings you have with
these companies will be perfect. That would be
foolish, as even reasonable people can disagree
about transactions. My recommendation is that these
are reliable companies with which to business — I’ve
done business with many of them for my own personal
purchases — though you should be a careful consumer
as you should be for any purchase.
Note
that some of these affiliates will advertise a
specific product in their link. My recommendation is
for the company and not necessarily the
product or a specific deal. I cannot test every
possible product, and without testing them all, I
cannot recommend any specific one. So when you see a
specific product advertised in one of the Resource
links, know that this came from the company and not
from me.
Banner ads:
we may use these on some pages of this site as well.
These may be supplied from a pool of advertisers —
as is the case with the Google ads — in which case
we won’t have much control over who advertises what,
or they may be handpicked from specific advertisers,
in which case we will have much more control. (And
it’s possible that we may have affiliate deals with
these advertisers as well.) In any case, we will
still place the principles of independence,
expert, and trustworthy first, and we
will not do anything to jeopardize your perception
of our integrity.
YOUR ADDRESS IS NOT FOR SALE!
One
final point, which is probably most important of
all, about how we will not fund
this operation. It’s spelled out in our
privacy policy, but
here’s the bottom line: we will not sell your
information.
I get
hundreds of pieces of spam in my mailbox every day.
So nobody realizes how annoying unwanted email can
be. I want you to know that if you give me your
email address or other information, I personally
promise that I will not sell or rent or give
your address to anyone or any company for any
reason. I will use it only to fulfill your
purchases, or to communicate with you about the
Professor Poor’s Guides, and that’s it. And if
you ever ask me to remove your address from our
lists, BAM!, it’s GONE!
Now, I
doubt you’ll find such a frank discussion of Web
site finances on other sites, and I hope that this
information is helpful to you. If you have any
concerns or questions about any of this, my “door is
always open,” at least in the virtual terms of
email. You can write me at
alfred@hdtvprofessor.com and I’ll do my best to
explain it further.
Alfred Poor
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