Quote:
Originally Posted by radiotvnut
I just saw an ad on TV, from one of the local TV/appliance dealers, advertising a 32" TV for $229. I'm sure these idiots around here will flock down there to buy one of those stellar TV's. They don't think about the fact that it will likely be in the dump in two years (or less).
|
Is that a hard and fast rule, or just something that was said once and repeated so often that it is now darn nearly universally believed as fact? I've seen the prices on 50-inch-plus flat screens, and it does not seem right to me in the least that these sets will fail in two years or so -- after the owner has paid such a high price; same for smaller TVs. Plus, I'm not crazy about the fact that my own Insignia 19" flat screen, bought new in August 2011, may and likely will fail the day after the warranty expires. Are these sets intentionally made to fail after only two years? Do the manufacturers put some kind of timer in the set that causes the unit to become unusable after 730 days or after the warranty runs out? (I don't believe so, since Best Buy does offer an optional four-year warranty extension which goes into effect the moment the original warranty expires; I didn't buy the extended warranty for my flat screen, but I did get it for my Blu-ray player and my flat-screen computer monitor. Go figure.
)
What is so darned special about this two-year failure estimate for flat screens, and who came up with that figure in the first place? As I said in a post to Insignia's flat-screen TV forum some time ago, if the makers of flat screens don't start turning out sets that last longer, a
lot longer, than the warranty or two years (!), whichever comes first, a lot of these offshore manufacturers and the retailers that sell their TVs are going to find themselves out of business before too long. Insignia is a house brand for televisions and audio/video gear sold by Best Buy, and as such the longevity of these products reflects directly on BB's reputation. Again, if many more of these Insignia TVs are returned to the stores with chassis problems or broken panels, etc., Best Buy may well find itself out of business entirely before too much longer. I am not actually expecting my set to go up in smoke the next time I watch it (or any time soon, for that matter), of course, but this business of almost any flat screen developing problems within a short (sometimes very short) period of time makes me wonder just how long my TV will last before it develops a serious repair problem and will have to be replaced. I will use my 12-year-old RCA CTC185 19" table set with a cable box if this happens, so I won't be without TV, but still I am very disappointed that flat screens -- especially the big 60-70" sets that carry $1k+ price tags -- are made to be discarded after they fail within two years (!), if the failure occurs after the warranty. Don't these stores or the offshore manufacturers of the TVs realize or care that most people cannot afford to buy a new television every two years or less? I have read on other FP TV makers' message boards that some people are now without television since their flat screens went bad, and these people discarded or otherwise got rid of the old CRT set when the FP set arrived. This cannot be good (in fact, it could be disastrous) for TV networks and their affiliates, either, since every lost viewer works out to so many lost ratings points; if a station or network loses enough of its viewers, the programs' ratings will suffer, and in the case of local TV stations, particularly those in smaller cities, the stations' very existence could be in jeopardy as well.