A few years ago we would have sold just as many Philips TV's as we did Panasonic's or JVC's. Then for some reason the quality of their dvd and vcr's dropped off rapidly, the design of the on screen displays changed and became nonsense and the reliability became a joke. This meant that everytime someone asked for a package deal, Philips had ruled themselves out of the equation. At around the same time their first generation PixelPlus system came out on the TV's. These models were good but the rest of the range below seemed to be cheep. After about 8 months or so the set started to develop strange faults like volume turning up and down on it own, station switching on its own, turning on/off, picture irregularities etc....
These were all down to something called the "painter" chip inside the tv an obvious design fault in my opinion as sooner or later these sets all go down with the same problem. This affected about 3 years worth of philips sets.
Needless to say we no longer sell philips if we can avoid it, while the Panasonic sales have more than doubled in the same period.
Real shame to happen. I own a philips Silver Shadow TV, it still performs really well, and still looks ok. But form our customers experience, I would not buy Philips again.

Like the O.P I also have the same machine and same problems, Mine is only 16 months old, Philips know of the problems with these units, and still refuse to do the decent thing and recall them. They will repair it for £90 inc courier charges , but if they cant repait it, they will give you a DVD3305

Ahh.....this thread makes me smile (with confusion)

I brought a freeview box around 18 months ago of which i had a technical problem, to save time i phoned up Phillips with the hope of rectifying the problem...they asked for the model number of the unit....yet they had never heard of it..and it was their CURRENT model!!!

Infact...they even stated that they do not supply that model and it was the WRONG model number printed on the box itself!

After about 10 minutes of being transferred from one post to another...i put the phone down...took the box back to where i purchased it from and had a refund.

They offer a lousy customer care service!

Well the first VCR I ever bought was a Phillips and it lasted a long time with very little trouble.

So because of that I bought a Phillips DVDR 75 which was mostly fine for the first year then started having more and more errors, anyway about 6 months ago it refused to record at all.

It is now still in the loft and I bought a Topfield PVR instead, best thing I have bought for recording tv

I've hated Philips product ever since I had a customer that owned a hotel who decided he wanted Philips TV's and VCR's in every room. The TV's were a complete pain in the arse for failing, and almost always because of the same handful of chips, resistors and condensers.

As for the VCR's - they gave a lovely stable picture WHEN they were running, which wasn't very often as the Charlie-mech decks that they were using had the gear components made out of the cheapest of plastics and they regularly chewed themselves to pieces. I can't even say that this was due to abuse in the hotel, I've seen them do it whilst on soak test after having everything replaced - they were just sh*t.

My VHS machine is a Philips, its at least 12 years old (probably more) and it was built to last. Great quality and still works flawlessy. A Philips VHS machine bought for another TV a year or so ago is, frankly, junk in comparison. Terrible build quality, poor remote control and OSD is rotten. It's a shame they've went so far downhill over recent years.

This is not limited to Philips, or even AV equipment.

I had an Indesit washing machine for 12 years, and only replaced it when the catch on the door broke. I thought I would buy another Indesit - it lasted little over a year.

It seems in the race to lower prices, quality inevitably suffers. How much was a VHS 20 years ago? How much is a top of the range PVR now? I am sure the latter is still cheaper.

Our piano-key, top-loading Ferguson VHS with a thumbweel-controlled mechanical tuner and a rudimentary wired remote control (which only did picture search and pause, if I remember correctly) was purchased in 1981 for about £550. That was a lot more money in 1981 than it sounds now.

No more Philips for me!

It's pretty obvious that their quality has dropped over the last few years- they used to have a good reputation too. Many, many people are reporting problems with their DVD recorders for it to be anything other than poor build quality.

It hasn't stopped BT from using them to build the set-top boxes for BT's broadband TV I notice! Rocky times ahead?

rocky times indeed!!

bt & philips seem to have a finger in each others pies, i reckon someones gonna end up with egg on their face.

Usually, the customer, unfortunately.

Last saturday I purchased the philips 37pf9631D. Having 4 faulty samsungs previously I decided to give this model a try on the recomendation from the manager at currys. After just one week I have decided I hate it. It's not faulty but I find the pq Isn't a patch on samsung, no matter how many times I tweek the settings the skin tones just look washed out in some scenes and when ever there is a coloured wall in the background of a scene it just looks all pixelated,I also dislike the Digtal Natural Motion, films just look totally wrong in this mode imo.So I'm not a happy bunny at the moment...

I totally feel your pain

Exactly one year and two weeks ago, I purchased a Philips 15PT6807 television for my bedroom. I bought this because it had a built in DVD player, and looked really smart.

In reality, it was a piece of absolute fvcking sh!t. The DVD player started out well, but got flakier and flakier. The tube had a "dirty" patch in the middle of the screen like a thumbprint, and text on the screen got more and more blurred. Talk about "Made on a Friday".

Eventually it just took longer and longer to switch on from standby - sometimes taking 5 or 6 hours!! for a picture to appear.

I simply could never be bothered to send it back (bought from eBuyer for £130). My girlfriend and I just put up with its shitness until it finally went out of 1 year warranty - I tossed it in a skip last weekend and bought a Dual LCD1502 and a Pioneer DVD player.

This Philips piece of crap has basically cost me over a tenner a month. Never again will I buy Philips. Their products are junk.

Philips have always been great at inventing, but crap at marketing.

With so many similar stories it does make you wonder about the wisdom of some at the BBC!

I hope they don't end up asking for a Licence Fee rise to cover the cost of faulty Philips boxes that need replacing.

should that be...
philips have always been great at marketing, but crap at inventing?

Well I have a couple of Philips products, a hifi CD recorder (several years old) and an external hard drive ( a few months old) and both work fine. The CD recorder has provided excellent service.

After reading this thread I feel very lucky (so far), but also very nervous.

I must admit I'd always associated Philips with quality but, sadly, it seems this is no longer the case.

Philips invented:

CD's (with Sony)
DVD+RW
VHS Video
DCC (Digital Compact Cassette) - vastly superior to ADAT (IMHO)
Audio Compact Cassette
'Rotary' shavers (i.e. Philishave)

See what I mean now?

No they didn't...the "Video Home System" was developed by JVC.

True. Didn't Philips invent Video2000? I think I recall, the video tapes were two sided (perhaps like Compact Cassettes?). Lost out bigtime to Betamax and then VHS!

That's what I mean't. It was a superior system to VHS or Betamax anyway.

V2000 better than VHS and Betamax??? Betamax was better than VHS but V2000's only better feature was recording times.

DCC better than ADAT? Are you serious? Mini Disc maybe but ADAT became a well used 8 track digital recording format in smaller studios a while back before HDD technology became common place.

What is not realised by posters on this thread is that most other top brand TV's etc use a high percentage of Philips components.

I also agree that V2000 gave better PQ than Betamax but the accolade for inventing the first home video recorder rests with Philips in the N1500. Overall the best early home vcr was the N1700 which gave 2 hrs recording at a quality better than VHS/Betamax/V2000.

VHS only succeeeded due to marketing with the exclusive deal done by JVC with the then film distribution companies.

This happened to me in the early days of CD hi-fi. There was a problem with the CD player, in that it kept freezing every time a speck of dust got on to the CD laser! The engineer kept coming and cleaning the laser, but in the end I gave up and bought a very reliable Pioneer hi-fi. :sleep:

Should have learned my lesson, but then I bought a Philips DVD recorder last year. The fan kept switching on during standby and would keep on going for hours until I pulled the plug out. Thankfully Dixons replaced it for a Daewoo.

Oh to be different!! I am fortunate enough to live near one of Philips reworked / returned products disposal shops in Nothampton. I currently have a 32" Philips TV, current Freeview box, DVDR 880, HDRW 720 and DVD player. all ex returns and all below the final list price. I also have a Pace V" sky+, a Thomson DHD4000 PVR and a Sony Home Theater (because it was the only one available without a DVD player / recorder). Other than the TV, I spred out usage as evenly as possible thus reducing heat build-up and wear. I have an origional Philips ON Digital box still working in the bedtoom and my daughter has another in hers. Have I ben lucky or is there another issue eg satisfied customers are VERY muck prone to submit this type of report???