Olevia HDTV Company Bankrupt - Warranties at Risk

[Microman]

Bought my first 42" HDTV Black Friday from MicroCenter. Must have been 2006. 799 for a 42" 1080I LCD TV is pretty good back then. Returned it twice to their warehouse about 33 miles away in the city of industry. But all is ok since.

[Bill in NC]

Absolutely.

LCD and plasma won't last like a CRT.

And good luck getting service on anything but a top tier TV:

http://hdguru.com/?p=107

[quote jdc][quote vision63]My old TV Repair guy retired a couple of years ago. He was great. When are the next generation of Fixit guys gonna gear up and populate the boulevards?
these TVs are all disposable anymore

[3d]

A few months ago my month old 50" Panasonic Plasma somehow got fried. No picture, no light, no sound. Dead. If it wasn't so darn big and heavy i would've returned it to Costco for an exchange or refund. I decided to try out their warranty service. If in the end i wasn't 100% happy with the results, i'll just reurn it.

The guy who came over lived about an hour away. Owned his own repair shop. I guess he was the go-to guy for Panasonic in my area. He says he get's enough business to keep him busy.

He rotated the plasma around and unscrewed about (no joke) 30 screws of varying lengths and widths, putting them all in a neat pile. He takes off the back of the TV and I see the inner workings. It's a mess of wires, fans, circuit boards, processors, more cables, and doo-dads. It looked like a computer back there.

He unplugs a squarish circuit board from the brackets, moved some wires out of the way and swaps it out for a new one. Puts the back in place screws in all the screws back in. And voila the TV is working again. Bad power supply or something.

These repair guys will have tons of business for years to come. Swap out a part and make a few hundred bucks.

[vision63]

I'm talking about a "dude" opening up a shop. Just got a MacBook Pro screen replaced by "The Powerbook Guy" in S.F. He does really well as a Mac repair guy. There "has" to be good money in repairing LCD and Plasma TV's. There are broken ones you can buy on Craigslist.

[Bill in NC]

IF they can get the parts.

Easy for a Sony or Panasonic.

Likely not possible for a Vizio or Westinghouse or Olevia.

[quote 3d]These repair guys will have tons of business for years to come. Swap out a part and make a few hundred bucks.

[Forrest]

>>It's a mess of wires, fans, circuit boards, processors, more cables, and doo-dads. It looked like a computer back there.

HDTV ARE computers! When I bought my Sony 3LCD TV about 3 years ago, it shipped with a notice stating the TV ran Linux and listed when you could download the source code for the TV.

[3d]

[quote Bill in NC]IF they can get the parts.

Easy for a Sony or Panasonic.

Likely not possible for a Vizio or Westinghouse or Olevia.

[quote 3d]These repair guys will have tons of business for years to come. Swap out a part and make a few hundred bucks.
How is this different than when repairmen needed to get parts and repair off-brand CRTs?