Originally posted by: craftech
I have had a Sanyo 31" TV for 3 years. My mother has had the same one for 2 years. Sanyo has the best repair record of ANY brand for large screen TVs according to Consumer Reports. (snip)
Consumer Reports is dead wrong this time!!!! (normally they are pretty accurate for TV's, but I'm taking your work here).
Sanyo's have crap tuners that fail if you sneeze wrong. Rank near the bottom.
Also, many ship with poor cold solder joints. Rank near the bottom.
Also, vertical failure rate is higher than most brands. Rank near the bottom.
Many low end TV's are much more reliable than Sanyo, although many are much worse than Sanyo.
The best you can do for low end is Sharp.
Even Toshiba rates below Sharp.
JVC is one of the best brands you can get, and is rated slightly above Sharp.
The above advice is from a tech that has been fixing these for a living for over 15 years.
I've seen them all, in every aspect from new warranty failures, to well out of warranty repairs.
The important thing to know is that many manufacturers want TV's to become like Bic lighters.
Sell it cheap, throw it out when it breaks in a year, then sell them another one cheap.
Good TV's like Sharp, JVC, and even Toshiba, should easily last 10 to 15 years without failure.
The other crap WILL break within 1 to 3 years.
Remember all those great deals on the Apex rear projection a few months back?
It cracks me up to now see many of those that bought one, and that I tried to warn against the purchase,
now complain how many have crapped out after only a few months. They act surprised, and don't understand.
Apex is so bad that we stopped servicing them altogether.
While we can warranty our labor, crap parts from the manufacturer are still crap that won't last, and gives us a bad name.
95% of the time, you get what you pay for.
