Quote:
Originally Posted by timmy
i see it this way all these modern sets are only to last just so long and then just throw it in the trash so that we go and buy another and keep the economy up. society is nothing but a throw away society and besides china, mexico,taiwan, hong kong, all have to keep busy building and selling these throw away items, to us. so if we were engineers of electronics we could possibly take these sets and modify them to fix the design flaws that those countrys incorporated into them in the first place we would be able to still use them 20+ years.although the crts did get much better and last longer so i guess they coudnt scimp on eveything,lol. well evey year things just get cheaper and cheaper and well i guess we are forced to live with progress.
|
Yep, that's the way it is now. Right now, one of the local electronics stores is advertising a 42" LCD TV for $399. With a price that low for what most people consider to be the "must have" TV, it makes it difficult to get any decent amount out of a certain good used RCA 35" CRT set that I have. And, in the future, I look for LCD TV prices to come down even more. I can certainly see them selling new 32" TV's for under $200.
That new 42" LCD is composed of many surface mounted parts and service information is probably not readily available. Those two factors limit what the technician can do to such a set. Unless the technician gets lucky and finds that the bad part to be something simple, like a power supply cap, his only option will be to replace the defective board. That is, if the board is even available. Even if the board is available, the TV will probably fail again within a year or two. By that time, the set will have reached the five year old mark, something "better" will have come along, and the set owner will not worry about trying to fix the old one.
As far as CRT sets, I can fix many of those without a schematic. I've seen 20 year old models, that had zillions of hours on them, still working fine or were easily fixable with cheap generic parts. But, those are considered "obsolete" now and people don't seem to mind paying out the butt for a new TV that will be dead in 3-5 years. Here lately, people have been giving me perfectly working CRT sets because they upgraded to a flatscreen. And, it's about gotten to the point where a used CRT TV has no value. Right now, I have a 19" for $25 and a 13" for $15 listed on CL and on another local online classified site. You wanna guess how many replies I've had? NONE! When I first started fooling with TV's a 12" B&W was a quick sale at $25. Now, it's hard to get that much for a good working 19" color set WITH a remote! And, if a good working color TV isn't worth $25 to them; then, they don't need a TV. Let them go buy the latest Chinese off brand flatscreen and it's not going to do them any good to come crying to me when it breaks.
In the past, I've sold used TV's to people and I would see some of these people, often years later, and they would go on about how well the TV was still working. Part of me wouldn't mind picking up some broken flatscreen TV's that I could possibly fix and sell; but, the thought scares me. Knowing how unreliable they can be, all I need is to fix up one of these sets, sell it to someone, and have them back on my butt when it dies in two weeks. And, telling people upfront that there is "no warranty" is like talking to a wall. I can promise you that if the TV you just sold them goes out within a month or two, they will be back with it and they will either be expecting a free repair or a refund, I don't care what they were told prior to the sale. And, if the price of new flatscreen TV's keeps coming down, there will be little resell value on used ones. It will be just like it was when wal-mart started selling new 19" color TV's for under $100. Who's going to pay $50-$75 for a used 19" set when they can get a new one with a warranty for under $100?