Crappiest of the Crap
 

Atak Apex
Naxa Etec
Element Insignia
Hisense TCL
Vidao Westinghouse

Anybody have any experience with these?

I see Elements, Insignias, Hisense, TCL, and Westinghouse often. Haven't seen the others.

John

TCL is Thomson Consumer Electronics. Their CRT sets are pretty reliable. I have four jail sets that work well.
Insignia is a Best Buy brand.
I think, Vizio was misspelled as Vidao. I haven't heard anything negative about their LCD sets.
At one time, Samsung was a lousy CRT set and VCR's were worse. Now buyers can't get enough of their LCD sets They do work well.

TCL is a wholly owned Chinese company. There may have been some remnants of Thomson as they went through several changes right at the end, but I think it's mostly just marketing as RCA and Proscan products seem to be the same crap as TCL. I stopped doing warranty work when Thomson sold out and the new company closed the Indiana offices.

John

Hisense and TCL are both state-owned Chinese companies.

The price difference between off-brand and name brand TVs is minimal these days so I would skip the cheapest stuff and spend just a few dollars more. LG would be my choice if I needed a new TV.

TCL, Hisense and Vizio actually build some pretty decent stuff.

I go to a Tire shop and repair center, that has a Vizio LCD set that is on for at least 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. It is possibly one of the first using an LED backlight. It runs off a satellite program source, produced by Goodyear Tire. I waited for my oil change with nothing to read, no coffee or soft drinks, because of that Corona Virus BS. :sigh:

If you upgrade to a smartphone you can read Videokarma in the waiting room.... When I first went to the family cabin in the Northwoods after getting my smartphone I had bought a Philco wireless 78RPM phono on the trip and wanted to recap it out in the middle of nowhere....It was one of those moments where you stand in awe of the world realizing that in a place where there is little radio or TV available, etc no landline or cable I can start my phone type a few characters in and get an explanation of what is inside an obscure 80-90 year old Philco block cap...

I've had good luck with Vizio. I bought a 32" Plasma set of theirs back in '08 that's still goin', but the power supply board had to be recapped lol. The 70 incher I had was a Vizio, I sold it a few weeks back when I got another JVC D-ILA projector.

I see TCL and Hisense a lot but they haven't been around long enough to know if they are junk or not.

I wouldn't be that quick to say all HDTVs are "crap" these days; some of them are darn good, IMHO, as I am about to explain. I have two Insignia HDTVs, both of which are working very well. I started with a 19" set that lasted well past the warranty, and is still working to this day. The only reason I replaced it just over a year ago with a 32" set was so I could see the picture better from 10 feet away (the distance between the TV and my easy chair). The 32" set still works every bit as well as when I bought it; I expect it to last as long as my 19" TV.

Insignia is a house brand of Best Buy; however, the actual manufacturer of their TVs is anyone's guess. I read somewhere (maybe here) that BB's HDTVs are not made by just one manufacturer, but several; that is, some of the components may be, say, Toshiba, while others could be from any one of a dozen manufacturers.

The days of television sets being made by just one company are just a memory now. Your big flat screen may be branded RCA, but a look inside the cabinet will tell an entirely different story. The brand name on the front of the set and/or on the remote (in the case of RCA, Magnavox, etc.) is simply being used by a Korean, Chinese, etc. company under license. RCA, for example, has been a well-known brand of home-entertainment gear for decades, so it makes sense that the former RCA's name and logo would be used on today's HDTVs; the same goes for Magnavox. The reason many HDTVs go bad so early after they are purchased probably has more to do with manufacturing defects, not necessarily "shoddy" parts, than with the brand name itself (in the case of sets made by Toshiba or any other offshore company).

You know me! I don't change that easy. Right now, I have a Trac-phone where you buy a card every three months.
I'm thinking about buying another pay-as-you-go one that has more features, before the time runs out on this card. On this one, I still have 5,000 minutes left on this service. :D

Honestly, if I had to bet money, I'd bet that was a CCFL, not an LED. CCFLs will run between 60K and 80K hours (except some Sharps...). LEDs are failing in the 2K hour and up range, depending on how it's adjustments are set and how the manufacturer set up the array.

While anything is possible, it would be extraordinarily amazing if that was an LED and lasted that long. Early LED TVs had some sort of ID on the front mask when the TV used LEDs, kind of like when early transistorized TVs announced they were Solid State right on the front.

But, if it's an LED TV, then it's possible that someone at the shop got some good info and set the TV's back light adjustment down below half. The life of the array is directly tied to the back light brightness, and dropping the back light adjustment below half will quadruple the life of the LEDs at least.

Also, if that TV was ever repaired, it's possible that the TV was modified. No LED TV leaves my shop without me reducing the current/wattage to the LED array by 40% to 50% (yep, that much) or about 30% if I install all new LEDs.

John

You can do the same thing with a smartphone. The process is to buy an "unlocked smartphone" from an electronics store like best buy or an online retailer, pick a carrier with a prepaid or pay as you go plan you like* (heck you can probably keep your current carrier) and ask them for a sim card (if your phone is a newly released model you may need to tell them the model so they give you the right one). , Insert the SIM card and possibly call in on another phone to activate it and you should be done... Trackphone probably offers smartphones too.

The unlocked smartphone is a smartphone that is NOT locked to any specific cellphone service provider... Meaning you own the phone and can switch carriers any time you want...if you like to drive to the middle of nowhere like some campers you could actually have and carry multiple SIM cards and swap between them if one carrier doesn't provide service in a place you happen to be (I'm considering doing this for an upcoming vacation).
Unlocked smartphones are a bit more expensive than carrier locked models as carriers discount locked models as bait to lure you into a contract.

*With a smartphone you need a plan that has both data and calling (texting too if you plan to use it). Smartphones without data are reduced to being basically big flip phones when you aren't in range of a WiFi hotspot....even if you have data if you get deep enough into the middle of nowhere data may not be available (as I discovered on a back roads trip to Iowa last year).

Most Smartphones have lousy battery life and need daily charging...I didn't want that so I did my research and picked a 'Moto G7 Power' because it had the best battery life on the market (it might still have the best) and holds a charge for about a week like my old flip phone did...I have been happy with it for the over a year I've had it.

How about these curved sets. I suppose we'll be seeing these on the roadside in a few years.
Do they have curved circuit boards?