Early Adopters Experiencing More Bugs? 129
As the pressure to push out new technology product continues, early adopters are continuing to experience trouble. A reader wrote to mention a USA Today article about some recent new product problems. From the article: "Philips Electronics revealed Friday that it is recalling 11,800 plasma television sets. The Ambilight TVs were sold in the USA from June 2005 to January 2006 for $3,000 to $5,000. Faulty capacitors inside the sets can spark. Nine incidents have been reported, but retardant material inside the TVs has prevented any fires, spokeswoman Katrina Blauvelt says. The problem is not expected to affect other brands, because it is a part related to Philips' unique Ambilight feature, which casts a colored glow on the wall behind the TV."
Product design incomplete (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just early adopters. (Score:3, Interesting)
This has been known for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
But it is fixed in the end and progress continues and there are then models that are gems that are known never to give the owners any problems at all and have few issues to ever have warranty fixes. that is what early adopters are for.
watch it continue with the new revision B iMacs when they fix the intel screen problems plaguing them, or revision B macbook pros fixing the dull flickery screen and keyboard brightness problems and dying magsafe connectors and the revision B intel mac mini when they fix its overheating, DVI flickering and dying hard disc problems.
early adopters pay a price but they get what is coming before anybody else so in that case they are getting an advantage by six months and they know they are sometimes willing to pay for something not as good as later.
Interesting article, but a bit dramatic (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not an overly-critical person, but I think the article is FULL of juicy, one-sentence generalizations like the above.
I'd be more interested in knowing the frequency of this type of issues, the actual brand to which these things have happened (beyond Phillips' issue), and the nature of the issues.
By the way, getting service on a TV, VCR, CD, or DVD machine is interesting. Contrary to the article's statment, you'd be surprised at how many brands are actually in the food chain of a very few companies.
Um... naturally... (Score:3, Interesting)
GJC
Less headaches (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course you are correct that just setting a light behind the TV is not terribly difficult, however some people do like to have nice clean rooms without a lot of cables and or extra equipment floating around, thus their tendancy to buy one of these TVs.
Re:Ambilight! (Score:5, Interesting)
May be bad capacitors (Score:3, Interesting)
Again, I don't know that that's the case here, and to be sure, bad batches of capacitors, at least in my experience, aren't terribly common...
Re:Releases have bugs, no kidding? (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked CLI support for 4ish years way back when. I saw a lot of things come and go, and a lot of problems crop up and get resolved over time. The problem with Audio support is that it's very subjective. Yes I saw plenty of hardware issues with CLI's products that eventually got revised or phased out. I also saw a lot of problems that were indeed caused by environment and / or existing dirty hardware.
As a tech, it's very hard to work these issues as you can try everything in the book and not get any results. You can even get creative (no pun intended) and try tons of your own stuff and not get any better results. Noises (popping or otherwise) are very difficult to remove from a digital AND analogue style system that is common with modern computers. Supporting it / trying to fix it is a major PITA for techs especially when they're flying blind most of the time.
I'm not saying that CLI isn't accountable (I'm not fond of the company now days), but it is possible that they simply couldn't figure it out. I saw a TON of problems like this when the ****** came out. For some reason it just didn't like some systems and we never found anything substantially in common between the systems involved. It was very frustrating. Especially given that the issue wasn't device failure, but rather device performance.
-Duff
P.S. From the support side (at least 8 years ago), we did everything we could to provide a solution as a tech. Be that sending data to developers (and working with them) or by doing extensive callbacks or replacements when necessary. If they don't do it now then shame on CLI. I personally haven't owned a CLI product in 6+ years so I couldn't comment on anything during that time period.