HawthorneVillager.com

Turned on my (2010) out of warranty Samsung 55" TV yesterday and it started turning off & on by itself.....pulled the AC, reset the cable box, nothing. Just turning itself off & on every 5 -10 seconds or so. By the way during this process before getting to remotes, I downloaded the manual, nothing in troubleshooting so I called the "customer support" line. After going through all the info, he was clueless. He put me on hold and he, not I, spoke to his "technical" support. After waiting about 5 minutes he comes back on and says "it's probably a capacitor failing in the TV!!! Now I'm PO'd at the thought of packing up a 55" TV to a repair shop and visions of $100's of $ in repair costs. He says he's looking at something else and my line goes dead....I gave him my contact info and thought he would call me back, not happening!

In desperation I checked the remote(s), pulled battery out of the OEM remote, no change, pulled the battey out of the Bell remote, BINGO. TV is back to norrmal.

I've dealt with a number of on-line CS groups and have found them generally to be helpful and go the extra distance to try and sort you out. This Samsung experience is a warning shot about future purchases from this outfit....

Anyway, Imagine the relief, TV works and all's well with the world once again.

AB

Same issue with a Sony & Bell combo. Never happened for years with Cogeco box and same TV.
Bell and Sony were both useless in offering suggestions though very deep in the Sony chat groups it is an identified problem.
Ultimately I switched the Bell box's between LR and Basement and both eerily worked again.
I'm convinced it's an flaw with the Bell box telling the TV to shut off. Somehow it gets its signals reversed and its hard to fix.

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No, no. You know who was right all along? The Mongolians. They knew that you just can't wall yourself off from the outside world. Putting walls up never helps anything. Tearing them down brings us together.
-Randy-South Park

I don’t get why people bother calling for support for products. It’s 2014 – use the internet. If you can’t find an answer online, there is no answer.

Nobody has ever gotten an answer from calling a product support line. Ever. Think about it…these are complex devices, and there’s any number of possible reasons why they may not work as intended. If you we’re smart enough to figure out why some guys TV wasn’t working without even seeing it, you wouldn’t be working some entry level tech support job. These companies simply can’t find people with the brains to do these jobs. It’s impossible.

My dad feels guilty bugging me for computer help all the time, and once an a blue moon he’ll call Microsoft for help with his hotmail. All they ever do is remote desktop into his PC, f**K it up, and then tell him it’s a problem with his ISP. If Microsoft can’t figure out that your email attachments don’t send because they’re too big, then you’re really in trouble.

I don’t even know why companies offer it anymore. They never fix anything, and they just piss off their customers.

They almost might as well not even offer any warranties on half the bullshit electronics made as well. We bought a nice Panasonic Plasma a couple years ago, the picture quality was fantastic. Now we have some bright green line through it. I switched all the devices around to figure out if it was the TV or other units connected to it, and it is the TV. Of course Panasonic won't do anything because its past the one year warranty; of course they make you go through their pointless waste-of-time support phone call just to get that as an answer. I guess they just want you to throw some more toxic chemicals in the landfill and go buy their latest product again OR you could just spend half of what you spent on the TV to get it repaired...which is also hard to swallow.

Sad, I remember my parents 32" Sony Trinitron that lasted 17 years until they replaced it with a modern TV...and it still worked the day they got rid of it. Sorry for the derailment!

Nah. The warranty is there to offer you some minimum level of confidence that the product isn’t a complete piece of junk. After a year, sh*t happens.

My first flat screen is still going at 7 years old. I have no idea if it will last another 10 days or 10 years, but it certainly isn’t an unreliable device. You just got shafted with an early fail. It’s rare, but it happens. I’d just vent my frustration by never buying that brand again, but really it’s probably just a fluke.

Buy these things on your credit card. Instant extra year warranty.

many of these TV's have a setting that allows it to be controlled via HDMI. Check the TV settings to see if you can find this setting and turn it off.

Might help...

I think there is some level of responsibility on the manufacturer. It should be designed to withstand an acceptable timespan of regular usage. I hope Canada starts to pursue better statutory warrant rights like other countries in the EU and Australia. I wish I could say this is rare, but I hear about this sort of thing far too often. In the end, cost of repair more-often than not exceeded the value of TV, so they bought a new piece of sh*t. "sh*t happens", is true, but its a bad attitude to have. Starting to show signs of failing after 2 years on a $1400 product, IMO is weak. The general consumer public has become far too complacent in this regard. And this is why there are so many poorly built piece of sh*t filling the shelves of stores. I have bicycle parts with 5, 10, and lifetime warranties (one is even 110 year warranty!) because they believe in the longevity of their product, and they see WAY more abuse (mud, dirt, grime, water, snow, ice slush, salt, impacts, etc) than a TV sitting in my temperature controlled living room. I still have an iPod classic (with the non-solid state drive) from 2004 that has been left in my car all winter in the cold, is scratched all to hell, been dropped, travelled with all over the world...and it still works perfectly (and I'm not putting Apple up on a pedestal, they have their fair share of issues around this). But I'm more than satisfied with that if it stopped working tomorrow, that is more than reasonable.

That bicycle part might have a 10+ year warranty, but it’s probably a simple device. A hunk of metal with at best 1 or 2 moving parts. It’s easy to build with a high degree of reliability.

The bicycle as whole comes with at best a 1 year warranty (I don’t know bikes, so I’m guessing that’s the case.)

A TV has hundreds, maybe thousands of parts. It’s impossible to make those with a low enough fail rate to justify longer warranties. I’m with you, it would be nice if it was longer, but Government regulations like they have in Europe are not the answer. Crap like that is why everything costs an arm and a leg in those countries. The manufacturers would just increase the price to cover the higher expenses they encounter, and everybody pays more.

Shitty warranties are part of the reason why you can get a 55” TV for $1400, which is mind blowing when you consider what it takes to make and ship one of those things.

Really, what you have today is choice, which is a far better option. You buy the TV with the basic warranty and take your chances if you want to save a buck. If you like, you can buy the extended warranty. Most people choose to take their chances and save a buck. Seems like that’s the choice you made. Why would you want the government to take that choice away from you?

Depends on the bike, a low end bike...yes. It's hard for me to speak on complete bikes, as I haven't bought a prebuilt bike in over 7 years. 2 of my bike frames (more premium offerings) have a lifetime warranty, most parts have at least a 5 year warranty, short of some consumables like wear items.

And not simple as you put it. Lots of moving parts:


You have things made from aluminum, steel, stainless steel, titanium and brass inside. Cartridge roller bearings, needle bearings, springs, races, interference fits, clutches, axel, shell, rubber o-rings, all designed and manufactured to an insanely high tolerance and need to withstand a lot of abuse and diverse conditions. This has a 5 year warranty. Simpler things have longer timelines. It also isn't cheap I might add, but I've also read stories of people with 10 year old hubs, calling this particular manufacturer and saying they need a part, only to find its not currently stocked. Once they look up the serial number, they can identify the correct part, and have a one-off made to the exact tolerances that would have been used for that particular batch, and a rev of the design, and put it back in service within a couple weeks. Don't mean to get all bike geek on you, its just an example near and dear to me so I used it as an example.

Panasonic, in my case, has a reputation for producing the highest quality plasmas (at least at the time). You pay a premium. Buying a Panasonic shouldn't be an equal experience to buying and dealing with RCA, Hitachi, or some producer who competes strictly on cost. They should be able to justify longer warranties. This is just what they can get away with offering because complacent consumers have just accepted the standard one year warranty, and then they have wiped their hands of it. In industrial applications (I work for an industrial engineering and machinery supplier) we could never get away with warranties like that. And if we did, they would be very specific to certain components (ex: like in the example of the bike, wear items would be subject to different timelines than other components). On top of that, these things are also designed to be serviceable with readily available spare parts; which is a huge sore spot for me when it comes to consumer electronics; most aren't or cost a fortune to service.

Consumers shouldn't be put on the hook because components weren't adequately stress tested in an effort to rush to the market with the latest and greatest. If that risk is going to be made, it should be the manufacturer, not the consumer. The only extended warranty I was offered was from the retailer, which most of the time is just lining their pockets. But you're right, maybe if electronics continue down the path of unreliability, it will has to be a necessary evil of buying anything.

I knew you would show me something like that! It’s a bicicle, it shouldn’t have a transmission! Lol

Still, an all steel part is fairly easy to make reliably these days. Electronics are notoriously finiky. I’ve seen computers running for 15 years without a problem, and others that suddenly die at 2 years old. I have no idea what makes some fail so early. It just happens.

I get what your saying though. You’d expect these things to be covered, as the vast majority do last longer. Still, I think the competition in the electronics business is so stiff, that what they are escentialy doing is offering you the cheapest option possible, and letting the retailers sell the extended plans for those willing to pay. It’s not a bad system really. And considering what you get for $1,400.00, I think what’s amazing is that more of them don’t fail after a year.

I Second this... This is why I disagree with the statement that you SHOULDN'T call in... Most resolutions like this are NOT offered over the internet, because lets face it, the company would lose more money. Nowadays most Customer Service groups are setup to have an "office of the president" which actually has a direct link should the actual CEO/President need to get involved. This approach was implemented closer around the turn of the millennium, so there should be a lot of companies following suit (Similar to how in the 90's price matching came to many retail stores).

But PP, that was a very interesting scenario.. I've NEVER heard of that, wow!

Internet is a GREAT way to start, but 90% of the problems I have especially with electronics were resolved outside of e-mails or website forums. I hold the manufacturer or Retail Outlet, nice to see you did too Pete, NOBODY should expect their product to deteriorate in 2 years!

Pete: that is exactly my problem. I haven't given up yet. I opened the lines of second level communication, so I am going to provide them with some more documentation on the problem and see where it goes. Products need to last a reasonable amount of time. "Oh well, it stopped working but most work" is a really weak way to back your products that you convinced consumers to shell out 1000+ dollars for. Not the level of service I would expect from a Sony or Panasonic, to just leave it like that. Maybe if I bought an Emerson from Walmart...