source Consumer Report’s Electronics Buying Guide Spring 2009.

note Sanyo and Sony scored the best in the amount of fewest repairs score of 1 and 2% respectively Toshiba, Vizio and Samsung scored the same at 3% and Polaroid and Mitsubishi scored the worse in repair history coming in at 6 and 7%.

First, i’ve been a frugal shopper/car buying\TV buying/lifestyle living person/ instilled in me as a young-in’ and I’ve watched as people in the US have gone crazy spending money they don’t have on things they should do without.

It’s hard to watch the @$$#oles on lifestyles of the rich and (crook-ed’) I mean famous or MTV Cribbs and not feel like somehow your life hasn’t amounted to as much b/c you don’t have those things….BULL S#1T!

People aren’t saving up, setting aside for big item purchases they hope to have for 10+ years of service. This complete shift in paradigm from what it was for most of the last century has caused a fundamental change in the way we get an receive our products. “Legal” competition is good to a point it prevents monopolies (Microsoft) and stops companies (those that don’t form a cabal to price fix) from gouging customers.

However, we in our race to have it all now and put on credit have often taken home items that are not of the same quality of other brands simply b/c they cost less (others have a Flat Panel TV…I want one…I’ll buy the Wal-mart special save some money….).
I’m not saying everyone should be buying the ultra-outrageously-priced-items here I mean the good quality panels, transiter material, capacitors, fluorescent tubes (soon to be LED – come on manufacturers GO GREEN ALREADY) at a reasonable mid range price; manufacturers that make these quality TV’s are feeling pinched and hard by the lesser quality brands.

The end result is that they too then go for cost cutting themselves…again SOME of that is good…but too much and we lose quality and the products don’t last as long or perform as well.

I had the pleasure of buying my 92 year old grandmother still mobile like a cat a well known LCD TV last year (spare the brand b/c it’s not relevant they all have bad panels or customers have irratic unclean power etc…) and then I had the pleasure of dealing with the customer service, which from start to finish, took more than 2 months to fix my grandmother’s TV. They sent someone out within a few days and they made the most common diagnosis: bad mainboard so they sent away for the new one, we waited and called and called and called but this new TV that they were still selling in the stores took them 1/6th of a year to get the part sent.

SO, my suggestion to all is to SAVE UP for a decent quality TV first (use that time to research TV — Find when each company comes out with it’s new models as you will see some of there best deals in the months prior – it happens every year at some point for all TV companies most~but not all~usually around the CES show in the spring).

And then when you could buy it with your savings, use a credit card (one that doesnt’ cost you anything if you pay the balance each month – and pay it off immediately) and one that offers you a warranty doubling up to one year (AMEX, VISA) == mine as some Visa’s do offers a VERY affordable extended warranty. 5 years for my TV was $99; 3 years was $66.

Opinons do equal facts

I never said cheap, I said economically viable. Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic ALL provide training to their authorized service centers to help make those repairs viable, and support their products with parts and good schematics(ok samsungs arent the best schematics) while vizio contracts out to onforce to a bunch of untrained(not all) technicians who just swap what they are told. You’ll rarely get component(AKA CHEAPER!~) repair on a vizio, unless the tech you take it to is good and knows their sets through other manufacturers, or gets lucky with some bulged caps or maybe a bad fuse.

If you still want to argue, lets take a lower tier company funai who make brands like emerson and sylvania. They are cheaper sets, maybe 300-400 for a little 32 in set. How do you get that repair viably? Well, funai makes their own sets and provide SCHEMATICS on those sets. So when that set breaks, I can tshoot it down the component level, say a capacitor or transistor, and get the customer a viable repair. 5-10 bucks in parts and 100 labor would be worth fixing.

Vizio, doesnt make their own sets, so they dont have this info for repairs, so you are stuck with replacing that 600 dollar board, or that NLA dvd mechanism.

So which is better, sylvanias which are repairable or vizio where you go buy a new one all the time when it breaks?