Quote:
Originally Posted by AiboPet
I wouldn't.
Electronic equipement mostly fails within a week or two if it's some sort of defect....and would fall WELL within the "take it back to costco". Buy your stuff at Costco if they do have it. You can take something back for a month I guess....even if you simply "don't like it". No matter where you got it though...almost any problem will show up within the standard 90days, 1 year...two years or whatever warranty.
If you are gonna buy a flat set.....stay with LED. do NOT get plasma.....and the thicker sets almost certainly have the flourescent (cold cathode) backlights. Plasma burns in and suffers from decreased brightness(permanent). Older LCD sets will have backlight issues or suffer from "image persistence", especially if you ignore the letterbox or 4:3 bars all the time (not permanent...but a pain to excercise out).
These sets are getting so cheap, that you'll likely not even want to repair one beyond something simple like a few caps. I would consider any warranty really just a waste of money.
CES this year was crazy.....All the majors had these new "4K" sets or "UltraHD". Effectively this resolution is like if you put four 1080 sets together. The funny part? There is ZERO content out there yet for these sets....but they are pushing 'em.
These newer sets are actually becomming quite reliable. One sure sign of this is that the manufacturers are starting to push GIMMICKY stuff like 3D and now UltraHD..... in hopes the public will just HAVE to have it, and replace what they have for really no good reason.
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My Insignia 19" flat screen (using LED backlighting), with no gimmicky features whatsoever, is now in the second year of its 2-year warranty. Worked perfectly out of the box and still works very well. I did not buy the four-year extended warranty when I purchased the TV and doubt if I will now, even though Best Buy does offer that option.
Yes, the TV makers these days are in fact promoting the heck out of gimmicks such as 3D, UltraHD and who knows what else may come along, but that's been going on since commercial TV began in this country in the late '40s. Zenith, for example, had a switch on some of its high-end TVs of the '50s that increased the vertical size of the picture. Later, they came out with wired remote control (the Lazy Bones) in 1950, the first wireless remote (FlashMatic) in 1955, Space Phone in some of its high-end sets of the '80s, etc. These were almost always features that did not add much, if anything at all, to the basic functions of the TV (except for remote control, which took off like a rocket in the '50s with Zenith's Space Command, and is now a standard feature of every TV manufactured today). One of Zenith's more memorable ads for Space Phone was the one in which three men were sitting in front of such a TV when it rings -- and the man at the right end of the couch hands the remote to his friend next to him, saying "Hubie, answer the television."
However, Space Phone only lasted a couple model years, then was dropped and was never again added to any other line of Zenith TVs. I had a great-aunt (now long since deceased) who had a Zenith TV with Space Phone, but to the best of my knowledge and belief she never used the SP feature.
Another gimmick that flopped miserably was the disappearing screen found on Zenith's "Space Screen 45" televisions of the early 1980s. The motorized screen rose up from the top of the cabinet when a button was pressed on the remote (this also turned the TV on), and disappeared into the cabinet, also turning off the set, when the power button was pressed again. The gimmick used a very complex motor drive system that wore out or otherwise broke down within a year or two; the sets became so troublesome (even if they otherwise still worked well enough to make a watchable TV picture) that disgusted set owners would have the screen permanently anchored in the "up" (viewing) position and the drive motor unplugged.
Space Screen 45 may not have lasted even one model year, given how very, very troublesome the sets' screen motor drive mechanisms were. I only saw one such set in my life; that was in a TV sales and repair shop in my home town in the '80s.
BTW, I wonder if there will ever be any kind of "UltraHD" or other special types of TV programming being broadcast in this country any time soon. I think today's 3-D TV is just a frill that is, at best, a warmed-over version, modified for use with TV of course, of the 3D movies popular in the 1950s, and will probably die a quiet death before too much longer (due to having to wear 3D glasses when viewing a program telecast in that format), not unlike quadraphonic (4-channel) stereo sound. I remember an article in an early-'70s issue of an electronics magazine that stated in the first sentence, in no uncertain terms,
"Four-channel sound. It's tremendous! It's colossal! And it is also A BOMB!"
Whomever wrote that article was right about the third point. Quad sound systems
did "bomb out" and disappeared in the early 1980s (quad FM broadcasting never did get off the ground; I don't know if Cleveland ever had even one four-channel FM station), although today's surround-sound for flat TVs is a vast improvement, with 5 or seven channels plus a subwoofer. As with Zenith Space Screen 45, I only saw one 4-channel stereo sound system in my life; that system was installed at the home of the volunteer examiner who administered my Novice class amateur radio license exam in 1972. The man has long since left the area and moved out of state, but I still remember his quad sound system, one of the first (if not the only one) in the Greater Cleveland area.