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draganm
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 8990
Location: Colorado
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| Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 7:24 pm Post subject: |
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| perisoft wrote: | They've got to pay for our time to do it, but we're not making any profit from it; that's not the way we do business.
Do you get it now?. |
yes I do get it now, thanks for splaining. you guys are dealing with extremely specialized product sources and your often at the mercy of what your supplier does or doesn't want to offer, forcing re-designs. I fail to see however where even one of your examples crosses over into consumer TV's and would explain why those are built to go into the trash in 2 to 5 years? there are no limit switches, servo motors, control feedback loops, or even a joystick on a TV or Projector. Every single part in there is standard off the shelf components, leaving cost/quality as the only variable no?
| perisoft wrote: | | You have no idea what technical issues there are. You have no idea what business issues there are. There's a 99% chance you've never even come close to risking everything you own to create something entirely new and bring it to market with no external investment.. |
well actually I did understand the technical issues you provided, I don't know your business chalenges though, i'm sure they're extensive too. No, I've never risked everything to do what you and your dad did. Even if i had the Capitol I don't have the nerves for it. Regardless of how it turns out I think your lucky to get to work with your dad, wish I had that opportunity.
| perisoft wrote: | | Yet you still feel qualified to tell me that I make crap, and assume I tell my customers to piss off? That's pretty f*cking rich. Come back when you've experienced what I have, risked what I have, and built what I have - and then tell me how easy it is to live up to your own lofty standards. |
well obviously I shouldn't have used the word crap, but your prior posts were hostile too. As soon as someone starts using words like Idiot, not making sense, etc. That stuff tends to snowball and the thread goes downhill, you know? The writer of the article wasn't an Idiot, he's a reporter. He went to school for Jorunalism, not electronics. His story wasn't a Red herring, it was a typical example of experiences people have with new TV's. This claim was backed up by the repair shop that fixes all this junk and is having trouble keeping up with the work. etc.
to people like Curt and myself, who like keeping cool stuff out of landfills, the story resonated. To folks like you on the cutting edge of more complex machinery, the story was annoying. Hopefully those 2 viewpoints don't prevent a polite discussion?
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perisoft
Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2920
Location: Ithaca, NY
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| Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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| garyfritz wrote: | | Wow, Peri. The amount of work you do and specialized knowledge you have just floors me. And that track -- wow. The attention to detail is amazing, from tire marks on the road to grass and distant scenery. How long does it take you to create something like that?? I assume you have pretty high-level tools (e.g. the simulation engine) to do it, but still... |
Well, like I said, the tire marks were automatically put there by the sim engine.
The whole thing was arranged specifically to look complex while being rather simple to do.
First - yes, I have high level tools. The main one is Bob's Track Builder (Made by one guy... funny thing? His name isn't Bob). This is what that track looked like in BTB at one point. BTB does a lot of the heavy lifting - you specify the road layout itself with splines. Along the length of the track, you can set the cross section, alter camber, randomness of various control points on the cross section, texturing, etc. It's got some nice tools that let you make walls out of cross sections, and so forth. You can tell it to splash terrain out from the track edge, with poly edges every N meters. And you can sculpt the terrain by raising/lowering/smoothing with brushes.
The trick is that there are... unique... behaviors for these components. Make the terrain pop out too far on the inside of a curve and the polys overlap. Make the wrong kind of changes to the spline while it's attached to terrain, and you can break the track permanently and have to reload. There are also any number of errors which will not only force you to reload, but delete the file you were working on - so you have to save separate files quite often if you don't want to end up killing yourself... But, like a lot of quirky tools, when you get beyond the quirks, you can work quite fast.
So, the technical stuff is relatively easy once you're past the learning curve.
Honestly, the tough parts are
- Knowing what to do in the first place. Your client says that he wants some Appalachian-style road, so you need to figure out WTF that means from him. And then you need to translate that into what you can do, and into what he really wants. He says he wants something with switchbacks and a fast bit, but it has to take less than 50 seconds for an average person to drive. So, how do you make switchbacks that allow a numbnut to navigate them but are still compelling and not obviously wrong, within the constraints of vehicle dynamics that allow the motion to feel right? Etc.
- Coming up with a color palette and visual theme. The Appalachians are lush and green... the haze looks a certain way. But you're going to be compositing some pre-built elements like some vegetation models, photos made into textures, horizon art, etc... If you get the colors to match, nobody notices, but if you just throw everything in there it looks terrible. So first you need to know what your lighting and colors and feel is, and then you can go in, pick a kind of standard palette, and redo your source material to match it.
Then, of course, you have to fudge things in your build because the rendering engine in-game looks different and applies light differently.
- Actually modeling the sh*t. Lush and green is one of -the- most difficult things to do real time rendering (or any rendering) of. Lots of detail, lots of detail that's in the form of almost volumetric areas of vegetation rather than distinct objects... Hell on earth to model. And I was in a particularly constrained environment - triple screen output so I'm pushing lots of pixels, wide FOV so it's easy to see problems. So, for instance, the trees close to the track are all 'real' in that they're poly modeled down to the branch level. Beyond that, they're 'billboards'. Most of the time, people use alpha mapped photos as billboards, but they look wrong, and are obvious, because the colors are different and the trees are different.
In this case, I made a row of 'real' 3D trees, took a screenshot, cut 'em out, and used that as the billboard. Essentially it was a kind of manual implementation of impostors. Because the colors and shapes are pixel-for-pixel matched to the 'real' 3D, the effect is quite good.
In addition, the 'real' 3D trees were placed to maximize their cover of the billboard trees. If you look to the side or backwards, the different point of view makes the billboard trees more obvious. So, I got maximum value out of the polys I used.
Shrubs were done with walls using textures that looked like lots of spaced out, random-ish leaves. They weren't in any particular structure, but you don't really see structure when you look at a shrub, you see a volume full of leaves. That let me get lots of complexity cheaply in terms of poly usage. I haven't really seen other people using that technique; I'm not sure why.
I also took the user experience into consideration. Any individual would only see this for 50 seconds. I put a lot of 'fake' detail in - a lot of high frequencies, so to speak. Stop to smell the roses and you'd notice that there was a lot wrong, but as-experienced the rider never questions the graphics and only sees the apparent complexity.
So... yeah, that's a little bit of what I had to think about to do it. This stuff is pretty obvious if you give it a little thought; you go through and say, well, why am I making this decision? Do I know?
The upshot is that knowing -what- you want to do is far more difficult than knowing -how- to do it; people are usually impressed by the prosaic and blase about the challenging. It's a bit like sci fi writers in the '50s, who envisioned futures where people could make perfectly realistic robots, but still required big physical dials and knobs to run simple communication devices, and could make virtual reality so good that an injury in the virtual world injured you in real life, but the virtual world had to be done with oil paints on a cloth backdrop (I'm talking to you, Philip K. Dick!)...
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perisoft
Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2920
Location: Ithaca, NY
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| Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 8:54 pm Post subject: |
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| draganm wrote: | | I fail to see however where even one of your examples crosses over into consumer TV's and would explain why those are built to go into the trash in 2 to 5 years? |
The same issues apply there, but on shorter timescales and larger volume and R&D. Manufacturers are forced by the market to make better stuff every year, so R&D is a big cost. And consumers put more pressure on the feature side than the longevity side. If 75% of your customers replace their TVs every three years, why would they want to pay more to get time they'll never use? I'm not going to pay another five hundred bucks for a computer so the components last twenty years, when the thing is going to be useless in five. Yeah, there are a lot of VT100 terminals out there that still work - woohoo; all that means is that the guys who bought 'em paid too much for 'em.
As Colin Chapman said, "A race car should be as light as possible and break as soon as it crosses the finish line."
| Quote: | | Regardless of how it turns out I think your lucky to get to work with your dad, wish I had that opportunity. |
I'm grateful for that as well - even though he pisses me off sometimes. 
| Quote: | | The writer of the article wasn't an Idiot, he's a reporter. |
Now you're just splitting hairs...
| Quote: | | He went to school for Jorunalism, not electronics. |
If his journalism skills aren't enough for him to learn enough to understand what he's writing, then he shouldn't write about electronics. Journalists have to write about a wide range of subjects, and it's their job to not make fundamental errors in fields they're unfamiliar with.
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His story wasn't a Red herring, it was a typical example of experiences people have with new TV's. |
I doubt that failures within 12 months are typical of current consumer electronics. That's what made it a red herring - he picked an extreme example and then briefly went over the real numbers. It's like interviewing someone who was mugged ten times, and having them say, "THIS IS A SCOURGE!" and then burying, "Muggings are down 2% this year" in a boring paragraph in the middle. It's sensationalism.
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This claim was backed up by the repair shop that fixes all this junk and is having trouble keeping up with the work. etc. |
They got a call-out in the article. If they'd said, "Actually, stuff is pretty reliable", do you think their company name would be in a big article in a regional newspaper? You're asking a guy in the repair business if a lot of stuff needs to be repaired... "Yeah, it's terrible! 100% of the equipment is broken!"
| Quote: | | to people like Curt and myself, who like keeping cool stuff out of landfills, the story resonated. |
I like that too. I spent a ton of time fixing up some old plasmas. I did the same to my RPTV. But the idea that electronics should have a high barrier of entry and that people who can't afford industrial-equivalent stuff just shouldn't have anything to begin with - that's kind of insulting to me.
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To folks like you on the cutting edge of more complex machinery, the story was annoying. Hopefully those 2 viewpoints don't prevent a polite discussion? |
The story was annoying because it was sensational and inaccurate. And polite discussion has a hard time continuing if I'm told that I have no honor as a businessman and my products are no good. That's the equivalent of saying, "Your mom is a whore!" and acting scandalized when the response isn't polite!
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Curt Palme
CRT Tech
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 24396
Location: Langley, BC
TV/Projector: All of them!
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| Posted: Wed Oct 27, 2010 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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Peri, what you do is probably similar to me repairing CRTs. Very few people do it, and it's really specialized work, assuming most people don't know PC board repair. For someone that knows PC board repair, a CRT projector isn't too different from an old CRT TV.
I actually believe that most consumer repair shops are there primarily for warranty support at this point. The cheap stuff is simply swapped out rather than repaired (DVD players are a good example), but someone still needs to check the unit under warranty to make sure its not user error, etc. Ask any repair shop what % of their work is actual out of warranty stuff where the customer gives the goahead to repair the item, and I'd say the number is very low. Let's exclude things like vintage audio and really high end equipment, say >$2000.00 or so.
With the computer monitors I get in, and I've had about 200 through the door so far, they've generally ranged from 2-5 years in age if that's any idea how long stuff lasts.
As for my mom being called a whore, that wouldn't bug me nearly as much as if I was told I had no idea what I was doing with electronics. I'm strange that way.
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perisoft
Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2920
Location: Ithaca, NY
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:27 am Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: |
With the computer monitors I get in, and I've had about 200 through the door so far, they've generally ranged from 2-5 years in age if that's any idea how long stuff lasts. |
It might or might not indicate age of failure. People are probably more likely to try to fix newer gear - if something dies after six months, it's pretty current, and worth spending a quarter of its value (or whatever) to fix. But if it's already out of date, it's probably not worth the trouble.
So the age of equipment you fix probably has an upper bound, in general.
Granted, if you never see a high end, say, TV comes in that's a year old, that may indicate a low failure rate. But on the other hand, there are far fewer of them, so the same failure rate could manifest as a very low repair rate. And high end gear is likely to be fixed more later in its lifespan since it's more expensive to replace and remains competitive longer.
Say, there are...
1k high end TV out there
10k low end TVs out there
After three years, you see a 3% failure rate for the high end and 4% for the low end. So you see...
30 fixes for the high end TV
400 fixes for the low end TV
This looks like low end TVs fail ten times as often when really it's much less.
After seven years, there's a 13% failure rate for low end and 10% failure rate for the high end - the same ratio. But now only 10% of people with the low end TVs bother to fix them - and because a lot of people - say, half - upgrade in the interim and never take the low end TVs in to get fixed, you're fixing 10% of a smaller pool. But 80% of the people with high end TVs want to fix them, and very few of them have ditched them, for the same reasons they want to repair them.
So you see...
65 fixes for seven year old low end TV.
80 fixes for seven year old high end TVs
From your perspective, what this says is that low end TVs have a much higher failure rate: You see far, far more fixes of young ones than old ones. But for high end ones, you see fewer fixes for young ones than for old ones, and you see more old ones that young ones.
From what you see, high end TVs last much longer. But really, the failure rates could be very similar - 97% of high end TVs survive after a year, and 96% of low end ones.
So the face that you see is that the low end TVs die ten times as much when they're new, and not many of them survive. But that's not necessarily really true.
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stefuel
Joined: 07 Mar 2006
Posts: 3353
Location: Green Harbor MA USA
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 9:57 am Post subject: |
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How many fixes for t year old crt projectors?
Also, when you consider failure rates based on what you see come through the door, remember how many millions there are on the street and given the economy, how many will give a shot at fixing the old one first.
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Chip
A Barco is only a AmPro with training wheels
Card carrying member of the AVS chain gang.
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 12:14 pm Post subject: |
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Well, I am not sure about this. I would imagine that there was a peak in CRT-based televisions, and at the time of that peak production there was probably a coinciding failure rate. And while it was obvious that a television was an investment during its early years (through, say, the early 1970's) and thus justifying the repair instead of replace mentality, I think the cowsumer marketplace just got more and more disposable as a whole.
With the disposable attitude and accompanying devaluation of said disposable product perception it was only a matter of time that making products with shorter lifetimes (and thus cheaper production costs) came along. Now add to this a catalyst in which technology on cowsumer electronics was accelerated and the whole mess was predictable.
But even with early failures, cowsumers can often smart shop--but cowsumers are often too ignorant to recognize this. For instance, buy something with plastic that caters to the cowsumer and extending the warranty an additional year. Then again, cowsumers can be fed upon by almost any major cowsumer electronics outlet acting as [legalized] insurance racketeer (ahem, salesmen).
But keep in mind the lifetime beyond, say, a couple of years for certain products in certain income households mates itself to the curren lifecycle of cowsumer electronics. I no more expect to get two years out of a flat panel than what the seller and plastic card issuer intend to cover it for (two years). Its a disposable 'TV'.
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ralpharch
Joined: 02 Nov 2007
Posts: 211
Location: Derwood
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 12:26 pm Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: | ....
I actually believe that most consumer repair shops are there primarily for warranty support at this point. The cheap stuff is simply swapped out rather than repaired (DVD players are a good example), but someone still needs to check the unit under warranty to make sure its not user error, etc. Ask any repair shop what % of their work is actual out of warranty stuff where the customer gives the goahead to repair the item, and I'd say the number is very low. Let's exclude things like vintage audio and really high end equipment, say >$2000.00 or so.
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I ran into this situation last week. A three-year old Craftsman blower wouldn’t start anymore. Replaced plug no change. Cost was like $130 new – Sears repair wanted a $75 authorization to look at it and a $35 deposit. A lot of the ones they had sitting there went from around $90 to $130 new or refurb. I decided to get a professional 4-stroke backpack model ($200 refurb $450 original) so that I would have a more reliable unit (it really does work a lot better than the old 2 cycle blower) and wouldn't be faced with such a dilemna if it ever needed repaired down the road (this is my fourth and hopefully last blower purchase).
Happy with my choice, but still faced with what to do with the original blower. Sears would take nothing for it (they are just discards to them. So I guess its off to the trash heap – or maybe I will try Free-cycle (but I don’t like the idea of people I don’t know coming to the house to pick it up).
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dvh99
Joined: 25 Dec 2009
Posts: 2158
Location: nederland
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 1:28 pm Post subject: |
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with technologies following up so rapidly there is no need to make products with mil specs.
look at the vhs dvd blu ray it seems that the lifespan is becoming shorter every time.
holographic discs are right around the corner and will be here in 5 yrs time i guess.
dvds are worth next to nothing now and so will blu rays in a few years time.
the 10 or 15 nm chip production line will be here in 5 yrs too, its just that companies need to keep selling things to keep alive, i dont see how to reverse this process.
and dont forget the fact that people like to get new stuff all the time, furniture could last a hundred years but how many have the same table or chairs for their entire life, i do but i dont know many people that will.
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Curt Palme
CRT Tech
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 24396
Location: Langley, BC
TV/Projector: All of them!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 1:51 pm Post subject: |
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Both of the last posts are exactly the issues I have.
dvh, you simply don't seem to get my point. Bluray is wonderful, but the first generation units were complete crap. Also, BluRay didn't win the format battle because it was better, Sony simply had more control over movies and wouldn't release them in HD DVD format. The whole design of BR and HD DVD could have waited a year until they worked the bugs out, HDMI should have been Beta tested for 2 years, and if so, I'll bet the posts here in the Fury forum would have been half of what we see there today.
We don't NEED progress at the rate we have it today. I want quality, I'll pay for it, and I'm certainly not going to jump on the next great thing when I know most likely it's not going to work properly anyways for a year or two after it's first released.
Ralph, I had exactly the same experience with a leaf blower and a pressure washer. Spent more keeping the cheapie units alive than if I'd bought a good quality one in the first place. With electronics, it seems there is no 'good' one. Some cost more, but have the same overall life span. Go read the +$20K forum at avs, the high end stuff has glitchy hardware/software issues just like the entry level stuff does. The only difference is that the high end guys will spend $1K on an equipment repair/upgrade as it would cost them $20K to replace the unit.
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 2:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: | | I want quality, I'll pay for it. |
Really? Why then do you keep buying the same bottom-feeder junk Dell boxes over and over, then?
SC
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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| ralpharch wrote: | | I ran into this situation last week. A three-year old Craftsman blower wouldn’t start anymore. Replaced plug no change. Cost was like $130 new – Sears repair wanted a $75 authorization to look at it and a $35 deposit. A lot of the ones they had sitting there went from around $90 to $130 new or refurb. |
The flip side to your story is my Craftsman two-stroke leaf blower that's been running perfectly for nearly 10 years now. A little clean-up, some STA-BIL or Sea Foam in the fuel every fall, drain the fuel and put fresh in in the spring, and after a little coaxing, it fires right up. Same with the Craftsman (Poulan) chainsaw I have. Besides, we're not talking about computers or TVs here... What's any different about the Craftsman leaf blower they're selling today compared with the one they sold 5 or even 10 years ago? I didn't realize two-cycle Homelite and Poulan small engines had really changed much.
The problem with this whole thread is that it's all anecdotal. A bunch of guys saying, "Yeah, this new stuff sucks! The old stuff was better!" Except it's (mostly) bull****. Longevity and durability are the ONLY way the old stuff was better. In every other regard, the new stuff is superior.
Yes, it's true that competition on features and price has forced value engineering to build a cheaper (read, much more affordable) product, but look what we've gotten in return! Instead of a $2000 200-pound 40" TV that literally took 2-3 people to move and a serious piece of furniture to set it on (and 6-8 square feet of floor space lost), we have 42" TV's for half that price, that one person can nearly hang on the wall by himself and take up NO floor space or furniture. I'm sorry, but to me it's a net-positive.
Yeah, I've bought a couple of 3-year old TVs on Criagslist that had a dead component, but there are hundreds more that are still running perfectly five years later. You guys are acting like CRT TVs never failed! For the record, my 3+ year-old Olevia 37" TV is still running perfectly, as is my buddy's 37" Olevia, my other friend's 37" Olevia, as are the LG, Samsung, and Sony flat-panels my dad has purchased over the last four years.
Question for you guys: If stuff never broke back in the day, then why were there so many TV/electronic repair shops? Or isn't that stuff didn't break then, but that it was easy to fix? That stuff is more complicated and not so easy to fix now and just not economical to do so because... Wait for it... A new one is so cheap?
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: | Both of the last posts are exactly the issues I have.
We don't NEED progress at the rate we have it today. I want quality, I'll pay for it, and I'm certainly not going to jump on the next great thing when I know most likely it's not going to work properly anyways for a year or two after it's first released.
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This isn't about what you or I want or need. Its about competition driving progress to get the better hand on their competition. Now, these manufacturers have a need to bring themselves the highest profit to meet the desires of their stockholders. They just play the human game really well. Ford did it when he slapped a Model Year on his cars, because he knew cowsumers 'want' the newer model and not that cowsumers need a newer model.
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WanMan
Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 10270
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 3:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: | Both of the last posts are exactly the issues I have.
We don't NEED progress at the rate we have it today. I want quality, I'll pay for it, and I'm certainly not going to jump on the next great thing when I know most likely it's not going to work properly anyways for a year or two after it's first released.
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This isn't about what you or I want or need. Its about competition driving progress to get the better hand on their competition. Now, these manufacturers have a need to bring themselves the highest profit to meet the desires of their stockholders. They just play the human game really well. Ford did it when he slapped a Model Year on his cars, because he knew cowsumers 'want' the newer model and not that cowsumers need a newer model.
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ralpharch
Joined: 02 Nov 2007
Posts: 211
Location: Derwood
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 4:09 pm Post subject: |
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| ecrabb wrote: |
The flip side to your story is my Craftsman two-stroke leaf blower that's been running perfectly for nearly 10 years now. A little clean-up, some STA-BIL or Sea Foam in the fuel every fall, drain the fuel and put fresh in in the spring, and after a little coaxing, it fires right up. Same with the Craftsman (Poulan) chainsaw I have. Besides, we're not talking about computers or TVs here... What's any different about the Craftsman leaf blower they're selling today compared with the one they sold 5 or even 10 years ago? I didn't realize two-cycle Homelite and Poulan small engines had really changed much.
....
The problem with this whole thread is that it's all anecdotal. A bunch of guys saying, "Yeah, this new stuff sucks! The old stuff was better!" Except it's (mostly) bull****. Longevity and durability are the ONLY way the old stuff was better. In every other regard, the new stuff is superior.
..
SC |
I also used Stabil and drained fuel and replaced with fresh. Still somewhat hard to start but could always do it - in the current situation could get it to start with the bulb priming but it would stall upon using up the gas in the bulb (so somewhat clearly a fuel delivery problem which I haven't a clue how to fix).
But to your other point - the replacement 4 stroke (professional model) is a real, huge step up in quality and performance. Starts effortlessly - and the blower is much quieter and puts out far more air flow. So the new, higher quality stuff doesn't suck, and it would likely warrent fixing if it broke down the road.
As opposed to the lower quality "new stuff" which from an economic and convenience standpoint is just better off trashing versus fixing.
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ecrabb
Forum Moderator
Joined: 13 Mar 2006
Posts: 15909
Location: Utah
TV/Projector: JVC RS40, Epson 5010
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 4:40 pm Post subject: |
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| ralpharch wrote: | | But to your other point - the replacement 4 stroke (professional model) is a real, huge step up in quality and performance. Starts effortlessly - and the blower is much quieter and puts out far more air flow. So the new, higher quality stuff doesn't suck, and it would likely warrent fixing if it broke down the road. |
Right. But in this case we're comparing new commercial gear to old consumer gear, and you're also comparing a nice, clean running 4-stroke to 2-cycle (which has always been a pain in the ass). So, a $450 (new retail) blower designed for commercial duty compared to a $150 consumer blower. Obviously, there will be big quality differences.
Besides, the new machine doesn't suck; it blows!
Now, the question is, who would pay $450 for a leaf blower for home use? Most wouldn't, which is why the industry offers a lower-priced, lower-quality product.
Getting back to electronics then, the same idea holds. Let's say Panasonic offered a "long-life" TV, and set it on the shelf next to the standard TV. It has over-rated caps, bigger resistors, it's a little bigger and clunkier for better cooling, a little heavier - basically just kind of a pseudo-mil-spec TV. Let's say they price it at $1500 versus the standard consumer-grade TV with the otherwise-identical feature set sitting next to it at $1000. They tell you right up front that that $1000 TV probably won't make it to 10 years and may not even last 5, while the more expensive model will probably make it to 10 years without a problem. Who would pay the extra $500?
SC
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AnalogRocks
Forum Moderator
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 26706
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
TV/Projector: Sony 1252Q, AMPRO 4000G
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:01 pm Post subject: |
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I would
_________________
Tech support for nothing
CRT.
HD done right!
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Jeremy112
Joined: 28 Sep 2006
Posts: 2649
Location: Fond du Lac, WI
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:11 pm Post subject: |
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Lets be honest here, the real reason cheap stuff doesn't last long is because its made for a Wal-Mart world. You can buy a new 23" TV for around $100! $100.... Gee and you expect it to last forever? No!
Its made cheaper so people with lower incomes can go to places such as Wal-Mart, and have bragging rights "Oh I just got a new TV"
Sure its an off-brand whatever but its cheap! Its not designed to be the best, it is purposely designed to fail so the Wal-Mart consumer has to take it in, realize it would cost as much to fix as it would to replace, and then... Yep! Go back to Wal-Mart and buy a new one!
I don't know how many other people notice this either, but my sister bought a computer from Wal-Mart a few years ago, no it didn't die,... right away, it took about 4 years and then had electronic failure.
If you ever go to HP's support site, type in a model of a computer you bought from Wal-Mart, THERE IT IS! right on HP's Website! it was bought from Wal-Mart! Hmm, they went through that much trouble to have a model # of something specifically tagged for Wal-Mart...
You know what? They are MADE for Wal-Mart customers, designed to be cheap and fail early. Thats how Wal-Mart sells their same "Identical" Electronics cheaper. They have them specifically made cheaper so Wal-Mart can outsell other places like local shops and even other Big Box stores.
This is what we all get for supporting a place like Wal-Mart. I have never, and will never buy anything electronic from them. How can you trust an entity as large as them? They have the power to shatter economies in small towns and cities, just by plopping a building in it...
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Curt Palme
CRT Tech
Joined: 08 Mar 2006
Posts: 24396
Location: Langley, BC
TV/Projector: All of them!
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:49 pm Post subject: |
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| ecrabb wrote: | | Curt Palme wrote: | | I want quality, I'll pay for it. |
Really? Why then do you keep buying the same bottom-feeder junk Dell boxes over and over, then?
SC |
After dealing with one man show hack comptuer guys that sold me complete crap computers and overcharged me for them (but less than the Dell I run), I sprung for the Dell. Somewhere around $1600 back 7 years ago. Best buy I've ever made for any computer I've owned.
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Jeremy112
Joined: 28 Sep 2006
Posts: 2649
Location: Fond du Lac, WI
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| Posted: Thu Oct 28, 2010 5:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Curt Palme wrote: | | ecrabb wrote: | | Curt Palme wrote: | | I want quality, I'll pay for it. |
Really? Why then do you keep buying the same bottom-feeder junk Dell boxes over and over, then?
SC |
After dealing with one man show hack comptuer guys that sold me complete crap computers and overcharged me for them (but less than the Dell I run), I sprung for the Dell. Somewhere around $1600 back 7 years ago. Best buy I've ever made for any computer I've owned. |
Curt,.. You're a smart guy, why arent you building your own computers? They are easier than CRT 
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