my 21" JVC bedroom tv seems to be on its last legs but surviving.
got it in 1999 for £235 from mackro.
3 years ago the RF tuner blew, at the time my stupid donkey brother was watching it and then tried to blame me saying its my fault cus it was in my room :rolleyes:
later on, the scart conntion started to fudge about with a flickering picture, that meant my freeview box had to go. i already have cable and had to use the phono connections between the box and the tv. lets hope the phono inputs dont die on me.
also, the remote is shockingly bad, i carnt use the ON/OFF button so i use the buttons on the tv.
WHOOO WHIPPYYY , MY 500TH POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Speaking of problems,
my (dads) that became mine - 7 year old Tv (Goodmans - "Crapmans")died last night - after 7 yrs. of constant use - its done well - might even get a cheap £89 21" Matsui for my loft - i dont watch tele that much but it'll do.
Alex
It mustn't be that crap if it lasted that long, my Thomson TV went pop over the easter weekend, and I found the receipt today - it was three years old that week! It had moderate usage and on the other hand, my Bush 14" tv, bought at the same time, is still going strong, and it has had much more use than the Thomson!
Hence, my AV system comprimises of Bush, Goodmans, Yamada and Amstrad stuff. If it breaks after three years, it's not as bad as if you have paid much more for a top brand name.
I'm not that keen on Amstrad, not that they make much now; I have an old analogue sat receiver, and it feels like it is made out of the cheapest plastic casing possible! (Although their computers used to be good) Does anyone know why Amstrad doesn't make many consumer electronics products now, apart from Sky boxes, and the E-Mailer phone?
I don't switch stuff off with a sledgehammer at night or anything - in fact I take good care of it!
LG stands for Lucky Goldstar which is their original trading name. But I guess they thought it sounded far too cheesey in this day and age! and changed it to Goldstar then more recently LG
Thorn EMI sold off their Ferguson division back in 1987 I believe. Thomson (French) purchased them along with all their technologies.
Thomson are a very clever company, buying up struggling companies such as Ferguson, Saba, Telefunken, Normende and RCA of America. Clever in so far as these are the manufacturers that invented TV as we know it today.
Telefunken held many patents on PAL colour TV, Ferguson co-invented NICAM digital audio (along with the BBC I think),
Thomson also pretty much own all MP3 patents (I think they brought the Fruanhoffer company of something)
Oh and of course Thomson own RCA which is a brand leader in America.
Anyhow back to the thread, I've had many brands of equipment over the years and had almost zero faults - kind of ironic as I used to be a TV service engineer!
Sorry, off topic but I'm curious, do Thorn still exist/make anything/have a popular brand name now in the UK?
I looked on the Thomson website, and saw the history of the company, it is astonishing how many huge companies they own/things they have invented.
It mustn't be that crap if it lasted that long, my Thomson TV went pop over the easter weekend, and I found the receipt today - it was three years old that week! It had moderate usage and on the other hand, my Bush 14" tv, bought at the same time, is still going strong, and it has had much more use than the Thomson!
Hence, my AV system comprimises of Bush, Goodmans, Yamada and Amstrad stuff. If it breaks after three years, it's not as bad as if you have paid much more for a top brand name.
I'm not that keen on Amstrad, not that they make much now; I have an old analogue sat receiver, and it feels like it is made out of the cheapest plastic casing possible! (Although their computers used to be good) Does anyone know why Amstrad doesn't make many consumer electronics products now, apart from Sky boxes, and the E-Mailer phone?
I don't switch stuff off with a sledgehammer at night or anything - in fact I take good care of it!
Gdb
I don't think Amstrad were doing anything except the Digiboxes until the emailer phone, which wasn't a huge success IMO. I know the Sky box you've got, we had the same one. I found the manual for it a few weeks ago, quite funny reading it.
I just found this on their website..
"Amstrad sells Betacom, Answercall and Cable & Wireless branded telecommunications business to Alba PLC for £4M in cash", doesn't seem that much to me, but further up their website they've sold alot of their business assets off. As far as I can tell all they do now is Sky, Sky+ and em@iler.
and of course Amstrad don't make anything themselves these days..... a local electronics design company near me designs some of Amstrad's digiboxes and they're made by some other company for them.
I'm surprised Amstrad bother to market anything these days, there isn't much profit in digiboxes and that Em@iler hasn't been much of a success really.
As for Thorn, I think they own some companies (or did) but I don't know what they're up to now (maybe still part of Thorn-EMI ?)
I'm not that keen on Amstrad, not that they make much now; I have an old analogue sat receiver, and it feels like it is made out of the cheapest plastic casing possible!
Yep, still works, although it isn't used much. I got given it so it may have had a nice rest since Sky Analogue was switched off. I would never leave it unattended, it gets very hot.
It doesn't seem much, selling all of those companies for just £4M!
So it seems they are happy just to keep doing the Sky boxes and Emailers?
Brands like Goodmans are contracted out to whatever sweat shop is cheapest at any one time - could be China or Turkey or anywhere really.
So sometimes you actually get quite a good product - my Goodmans 28" TV has given 14 years worth of service until it expired recently - and it's quite repairable if I could be bothered.
Well I love to upset, so from my experience of Goodmans TV's -
some were made by Tatung (usually in the UK) - Tatung (also sold as DeccaColour or VIbrant) make many TV's for other brands, their 14" TV's appear under names like Goodmans, Matsui, Akai (I think), and possibly others.
Some Goodmans were made by Thomson (yes!) some years back However, these were generally made specially for Comet and seemed to use inferior (rejected?) picture tubes. giving poorer imagesThey were obviously made to a cheap price and not really directly comparable to Thomson.
Some Goodmans are now made by Vestel in Turkey if I recall.
So basically some can be good and some can be a load of rubbish.
And finally, I'm sure that when I sold Panasonic TVs, we were told that they shared a factory in Poland with Samsung (I might be wrong) where they made budget 14" and 21" TV's and NOT the more expensive models.
LG stands for Lucky Goldstar which is their original trading name. But I guess they thought it sounded far too cheesey in this day and age! and changed it to Goldstar then more recently LG
Yeah, thats what I was getting at, perhaps I wasn't very clear. When they were branded Goldstar they were pretty poor. Just shows how important a brand name is.
I agree at Matsui of one of the best budget brands. We've had 3 Matsui TVs (2 still in use), and 3 VCRs (all in use) in my family and never a problem with any. Admittedly theres no bells and whistles but you can't argue for the price. The TV not being used was retired and swapped for a bigger one, but still works fine. Looks very dated though! Also had a Matsui hi-fi that was retired for something more, erm...hi-fi. That still worked too.
I have a Pacific DVD which is very good and these get good reviews on AV Forums but have heard their TVs are to be avoided - what sort of problems have you encountered with them?
Expensive items which I bought in the mid-90s, like my Mitsubishi M1000 SVHS VCR (RRP £800) and my Onkyo surround processor (RRP £900) both died within three years.
All the cheaper stuff I've bought is still working.
I agree with diablo, I've got a Pioneer stereo that was pretty expensive 6 or 7 years ago, its not had that much use, but the radio is useless, neither tapes work, and the cd player spits the CD out after half a track. All I use it for now is on Video, where I have the computer going through it.
Can't say I'm particularly pleased with the philips stereo I bought 4 years ago.
It cost £279 in its day and had all the flashy lights and posh motorised wotsits. The amp packed up while I was playing GTA3. It works, but the amp dies after a while, requiring you to unplug it (!) and plug it back in.
Now got a posh sony system (no triple disc changer though ). It's doing very well - much clearer sound, MP3 reader, various, more useful features. And this time, both tape decks can rewind and play both sides
Our trusty Toshiba TV (nicam, blah blah, subwoofer the size of the bloody titanic built in) is giving up the ghost - the image has shifted up a little, leaving a black bar at the bottom, and the image stretched at the top, which is REALLY irritating!
I think it's all too easy to disregard a brand if you have one bad experience with one of their products. I think it largely depends on how well a particular product/batch is produced.
I have a 11 year old JVC hi-fi system that is still going strong and it's because of this I bought another JVC as a replacement. However this newer model had all the bells and whistles, which gave up the ghost barely a year after I'd bought it. So the moral of story is: it's all about a luck and whether you're unfortunate enough to buy a duff one or not.
Many of the problems are caused by big brand names contracting out assembly of equipment to cheap labour areas which can be anywhere in eastern Europe, China or beyond.
In the eighties, a fair amount was assembled in the UK - Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and others - but this is increasingly being moved elsewhere.
If you get a good factory - you may be lucky - or not.
I must say that over the years, Sony, Marantz, Sanyo, Aiwa, JVC and some others have been pretty good.
The joker in the pack has been Philips which ranges from being almost brilliant to being a complete donkey - especially VCRs.
Their TVs are very badly set up too - poor power supplies are endemic.
Goodmans gets an honourable mention, Sharp gets the booby prize and Samsung best newcomer.
Matsui is a toss of the coin, Pace is mostly OK and Grundig used to be so good - alas no more...
You'd be suprised which brand owns which, and what brands actually co-operate in producing parts or even entire units.
Also, what is sold as one brand in one country, might be sold as a completely different brand in another.
Let's take Philips as an example (because i'm Dutch..lol just kidding).
Philips sells most of it's products under the brandname "Magnavox" in the US. Why? Because Magnavox is better known there and doesn't sound European.
Thomson sells it's products under the brandname "RCA" in the US. For the same reason.
Philips owns Aristona, which it uses as an entry-level brandname.
Most TV's sold under names as Bush, Goodmans, Finlux, Supertech etc. are actually Asian products (usually Korean) that are sold in their native area under brandnames we've never heard of.
Sometimes big companies are impressed by these items and rebrand them under their own name. For example, Diamond used to sell iRiver mp3-players under it's brandnames RIO and SonicBLUE. When Diamond went bust, iRiver saw their chance and introduced themselves to the European and US markets. They now sell their products under their own brandname with success.
In my experience Thomson/Ferguson are the worst -- at least their TVs are. Between various members of our family we've had no less than 5 Thomson group TVs in the last decade, and ALL OF THEM have expired or developed serious problems within the first 4 years. A terrible record.
Orion-based VCRs are the pits as well (some Alba/Bush/Goodmans, Matsui, JMB, Orion etc etc). They develop problems with the MF switch and all start chewing tapes after 2-3 years, and replacing the defective part doesn't seem to help. Cheap garbage IMHO.
Underrated stuff includes Samsung, LG, Hyundai stuff is good if you can get the real thing and not a badge-engineered cheapie (but these are rare). I always go for Toshiba and Panasonic wherever possible these days.
In general, *all* of the Japanese and Korean manufacturers make very solid, reliable kit -- the problem is this only applies to stuff made in Japan or Korea. You look at any true Japanese VCR made in the early 80s -- Sanyo, JVC, Ferguson (made by JVC back then), Panasonic. Many of them are still going strong today. Likewise, buy a good Made in Japan, Japanese separates unit now and the majority will still be going ten years from now.
As has been said though, so many of the manufacturers get the like of Beko, Orion/Thakral etc etc to make their stuff for them that if it's reliability you're after, the Beko-branded stuff will be as good as a lot of them. As has been said, Mitsubishi pulled out of the UK electronics market some time ago and the "Mitsubishi" stuff you get now is not the real thing. However, my neighbour has an imported Mitsubishi DVD player from Japan from around 1996-7, and it is a work of art -- so beautifully put together. It's been absolutely hammered, and flatly refuses to go wrong. Which is more than can be said for the mass-produced junk we get here. Sometimes I wish I lived in Japan
What you tend to find is that at the lower end of the scale, the *majority* of branded products these days are designed and manufactured by smaller, usually far Eastern or Turkish producers. Philips VCRs were/are produced by Fisher (remember them), Aiwa by Orion, and JVC by a Korean group whose name escapes me. Certainly the like of Alba Group, Matsui, Naiko, Akura and stuff like that can be made by any one of 101 different makes, and usually even if you buy a TV/VCR/DVD player package they'll be made in 3 different countries by 3 different manufacturers. Therefore it is impossible to say whether these products are any good from past experience. For that reason Beko and Orion are better bets, because at least with those two you know where you stand -- Beko is Turkish and Orion is Thai.
Generally though, Matsushita group (Panasonic/Technics/JVC/Hitachi is related), Samsung, Sony/Aiwa, Philips generally contain in-house components, as long as you get a relatively high-end model. Therefore in my eyes these are preferable to the like of Grundig who outsource (and now are bust anyway).
What was really interesting - well to me is that when i was in Argos I was fiddling wit an Alba TV and a Tosh. and they had exacly the same menu and so did the Hitachi. Yes exactly the same look and layout. Interesting.
I've had a Ferguson TV and a Ferguson-badged Thomson VCR for going on ten years. Terrible customer service from Thomson when I first got the video. I reported a feature/bug where the audio recording level is set to manual by default, and it returns to manual for timer recordings even if you try to switch it to auto; Thomson's customer services guy didn't understand the concept of a "default" setting and just kept saying "if you put it on auto it will stay on auto" which wasn't true. OK, not a major issue but then there was the PDC problem: it kept ending PDC recordings after only fifteen seconds. This time the Thomson answer was that the VCR was working correctly but the BBC's implementation of PDC didn't meet European standards.
It's a cool looking VCR, "designed" by Phillipe Starck no less, but basically a heap of junk. Still works - just - so long as you don't try to rewind in play mode, as it will simply chew the tape up and switch itself off in disgust. The TV, on the other hand, still works perfectly.
Comments
got it in 1999 for £235 from mackro.
3 years ago the RF tuner blew, at the time my stupid donkey brother was watching it and then tried to blame me saying its my fault cus it was in my room :rolleyes:
later on, the scart conntion started to fudge about with a flickering picture, that meant my freeview box had to go. i already have cable and had to use the phono connections between the box and the tv. lets hope the phono inputs dont die on me.
also, the remote is shockingly bad, i carnt use the ON/OFF button so i use the buttons on the tv.
WHOOO WHIPPYYY , MY 500TH POST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It mustn't be that crap if it lasted that long, my Thomson TV went pop over the easter weekend, and I found the receipt today - it was three years old that week! It had moderate usage and on the other hand, my Bush 14" tv, bought at the same time, is still going strong, and it has had much more use than the Thomson!
Hence, my AV system comprimises of Bush, Goodmans, Yamada and Amstrad stuff. If it breaks after three years, it's not as bad as if you have paid much more for a top brand name.
I'm not that keen on Amstrad, not that they make much now; I have an old analogue sat receiver, and it feels like it is made out of the cheapest plastic casing possible! (Although their computers used to be good) Does anyone know why Amstrad doesn't make many consumer electronics products now, apart from Sky boxes, and the E-Mailer phone?
I don't switch stuff off with a sledgehammer at night or anything - in fact I take good care of it!
Gdb
Sorry, off topic but I'm curious, do Thorn still exist/make anything/have a popular brand name now in the UK?
I looked on the Thomson website, and saw the history of the company, it is astonishing how many huge companies they own/things they have invented.
Gdb
I don't think Amstrad were doing anything except the Digiboxes until the emailer phone, which wasn't a huge success IMO. I know the Sky box you've got, we had the same one. I found the manual for it a few weeks ago, quite funny reading it.
I just found this on their website..
"Amstrad sells Betacom, Answercall and Cable & Wireless branded telecommunications business to Alba PLC for £4M in cash", doesn't seem that much to me, but further up their website they've sold alot of their business assets off. As far as I can tell all they do now is Sky, Sky+ and em@iler.
I'm surprised Amstrad bother to market anything these days, there isn't much profit in digiboxes and that Em@iler hasn't been much of a success really.
As for Thorn, I think they own some companies (or did) but I don't know what they're up to now (maybe still part of Thorn-EMI ?)
AHH but does it still work?
Breaks little by litte in few first months but at least its cheap
It doesn't seem much, selling all of those companies for just £4M!
So it seems they are happy just to keep doing the Sky boxes and Emailers?
Gdb
So sometimes you actually get quite a good product - my Goodmans 28" TV has given 14 years worth of service until it expired recently - and it's quite repairable if I could be bothered.
Then again the next one could be rotten...
some were made by Tatung (usually in the UK) - Tatung (also sold as DeccaColour or VIbrant) make many TV's for other brands, their 14" TV's appear under names like Goodmans, Matsui, Akai (I think), and possibly others.
Some Goodmans were made by Thomson (yes!) some years back However, these were generally made specially for Comet and seemed to use inferior (rejected?) picture tubes. giving poorer imagesThey were obviously made to a cheap price and not really directly comparable to Thomson.
Some Goodmans are now made by Vestel in Turkey if I recall.
So basically some can be good and some can be a load of rubbish.
And finally, I'm sure that when I sold Panasonic TVs, we were told that they shared a factory in Poland with Samsung (I might be wrong) where they made budget 14" and 21" TV's and NOT the more expensive models.
Still a 14 year old set with two SCARTS and RGB in is fine by me - and it cost less than £300...
Yeah, thats what I was getting at, perhaps I wasn't very clear. When they were branded Goldstar they were pretty poor. Just shows how important a brand name is.
I agree at Matsui of one of the best budget brands. We've had 3 Matsui TVs (2 still in use), and 3 VCRs (all in use) in my family and never a problem with any. Admittedly theres no bells and whistles but you can't argue for the price. The TV not being used was retired and swapped for a bigger one, but still works fine. Looks very dated though! Also had a Matsui hi-fi that was retired for something more, erm...hi-fi. That still worked too.
Expensive items which I bought in the mid-90s, like my Mitsubishi M1000 SVHS VCR (RRP £800) and my Onkyo surround processor (RRP £900) both died within three years.
All the cheaper stuff I've bought is still working.
Recently bought Matsui freeview box (a bit offtopic, but thought I'd slip it in anyway).
It cost £279 in its day and had all the flashy lights and posh motorised wotsits. The amp packed up while I was playing GTA3. It works, but the amp dies after a while, requiring you to unplug it (!) and plug it back in.
Now got a posh sony system (no triple disc changer though
Our trusty Toshiba TV (nicam, blah blah, subwoofer the size of the bloody titanic built in) is giving up the ghost - the image has shifted up a little, leaving a black bar at the bottom, and the image stretched at the top, which is REALLY irritating!
I have a 11 year old JVC hi-fi system that is still going strong and it's because of this I bought another JVC as a replacement. However this newer model had all the bells and whistles, which gave up the ghost barely a year after I'd bought it. So the moral of story is: it's all about a luck and whether you're unfortunate enough to buy a duff one or not.
In the eighties, a fair amount was assembled in the UK - Sony, Panasonic, Mitsubishi and others - but this is increasingly being moved elsewhere.
If you get a good factory - you may be lucky - or not.
I must say that over the years, Sony, Marantz, Sanyo, Aiwa, JVC and some others have been pretty good.
The joker in the pack has been Philips which ranges from being almost brilliant to being a complete donkey - especially VCRs.
Their TVs are very badly set up too - poor power supplies are endemic.
Goodmans gets an honourable mention, Sharp gets the booby prize and Samsung best newcomer.
Matsui is a toss of the coin, Pace is mostly OK and Grundig used to be so good - alas no more...
But luck is still a factor...
Also, what is sold as one brand in one country, might be sold as a completely different brand in another.
Let's take Philips as an example (because i'm Dutch..lol just kidding).
Philips sells most of it's products under the brandname "Magnavox" in the US. Why? Because Magnavox is better known there and doesn't sound European.
Thomson sells it's products under the brandname "RCA" in the US. For the same reason.
Philips owns Aristona, which it uses as an entry-level brandname.
Most TV's sold under names as Bush, Goodmans, Finlux, Supertech etc. are actually Asian products (usually Korean) that are sold in their native area under brandnames we've never heard of.
Sometimes big companies are impressed by these items and rebrand them under their own name. For example, Diamond used to sell iRiver mp3-players under it's brandnames RIO and SonicBLUE. When Diamond went bust, iRiver saw their chance and introduced themselves to the European and US markets. They now sell their products under their own brandname with success.
Cheers,
HN.
Orion-based VCRs are the pits as well (some Alba/Bush/Goodmans, Matsui, JMB, Orion etc etc). They develop problems with the MF switch and all start chewing tapes after 2-3 years, and replacing the defective part doesn't seem to help. Cheap garbage IMHO.
Underrated stuff includes Samsung, LG, Hyundai stuff is good if you can get the real thing and not a badge-engineered cheapie (but these are rare). I always go for Toshiba and Panasonic wherever possible these days.
In general, *all* of the Japanese and Korean manufacturers make very solid, reliable kit -- the problem is this only applies to stuff made in Japan or Korea. You look at any true Japanese VCR made in the early 80s -- Sanyo, JVC, Ferguson (made by JVC back then), Panasonic. Many of them are still going strong today. Likewise, buy a good Made in Japan, Japanese separates unit now and the majority will still be going ten years from now.
As has been said though, so many of the manufacturers get the like of Beko, Orion/Thakral etc etc to make their stuff for them that if it's reliability you're after, the Beko-branded stuff will be as good as a lot of them. As has been said, Mitsubishi pulled out of the UK electronics market some time ago and the "Mitsubishi" stuff you get now is not the real thing. However, my neighbour has an imported Mitsubishi DVD player from Japan from around 1996-7, and it is a work of art -- so beautifully put together. It's been absolutely hammered, and flatly refuses to go wrong. Which is more than can be said for the mass-produced junk we get here. Sometimes I wish I lived in Japan
What you tend to find is that at the lower end of the scale, the *majority* of branded products these days are designed and manufactured by smaller, usually far Eastern or Turkish producers. Philips VCRs were/are produced by Fisher (remember them), Aiwa by Orion, and JVC by a Korean group whose name escapes me. Certainly the like of Alba Group, Matsui, Naiko, Akura and stuff like that can be made by any one of 101 different makes, and usually even if you buy a TV/VCR/DVD player package they'll be made in 3 different countries by 3 different manufacturers. Therefore it is impossible to say whether these products are any good from past experience. For that reason Beko and Orion are better bets, because at least with those two you know where you stand -- Beko is Turkish and Orion is Thai.
Generally though, Matsushita group (Panasonic/Technics/JVC/Hitachi is related), Samsung, Sony/Aiwa, Philips generally contain in-house components, as long as you get a relatively high-end model. Therefore in my eyes these are preferable to the like of Grundig who outsource (and now are bust anyway).
Alex
I've had a Ferguson TV and a Ferguson-badged Thomson VCR for going on ten years. Terrible customer service from Thomson when I first got the video. I reported a feature/bug where the audio recording level is set to manual by default, and it returns to manual for timer recordings even if you try to switch it to auto; Thomson's customer services guy didn't understand the concept of a "default" setting and just kept saying "if you put it on auto it will stay on auto" which wasn't true. OK, not a major issue but then there was the PDC problem: it kept ending PDC recordings after only fifteen seconds. This time the Thomson answer was that the VCR was working correctly but the BBC's implementation of PDC didn't meet European standards.
It's a cool looking VCR, "designed" by Phillipe Starck no less, but basically a heap of junk. Still works - just - so long as you don't try to rewind in play mode, as it will simply chew the tape up and switch itself off in disgust. The TV, on the other hand, still works perfectly.