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Has the Quality of Consumer Electronics Declined?
NewtonsLaw asks: "With Christmas coming up I dare say that lots of people are going to spend big bucks on consumer electronics in the next few weeks. This column asks an interesting question -- are consumer electronics manufacturers sacrificing quality and reliability for an endless list of features? If you're like me, you've probably got a TV, VCR or other appliance you bought over 5 years ago which is still going strong -- but much of the stuff you've bought in the past 2-3 years is already giving trouble. What's more, it seems to be the big-name manufacturers such as Sony who are most affected by this decline in standards. I'd love to hear the experiences of other Slashdot readers in an effort to get as many data-points as possible. Are you better off buying a $49 DVD player on the expectation that it will only last a year or so -- or do lay out two or three times that amount something made by a big-name manufacturer in the (possibly vain) hope it will provide superior performance and last longer?"
For some reason most of my home electronic equipment comes from Sony. I have a stereo, a surround receiver and stuff like that. And, oh yeah, a Sony Ericsson phone. They've never caused me any problems ever. Just plain works. Not the best gear out there, but good value for money. Perhaps other brands are worse, I don't know.
Ciryon
As an avionics technician I can attest that consumer electronics is not the only field suffering. I work for a company that prides itself on quality, and most of the new units see my bench
less than a year after manufacture, however there is a slow flow of instruments built 10 years ago that are just now seeing the shop for the first time. Kind of a horrifying thought for you while riding on that airplane
Quality of new items seems to be lower than it used to be. I own tons of consumer electronics devices, way more than the average person, I'm sure. The things I buy now don't last as long. I've been through 3 dvd players in 4 years, and they were all over $150. Yet I have a set of speakers that are 12 years old (!) and still work perfectly.
There's also no point in fixing any of these items, everything is soldered onto one PCB board. If one trace comes loose... Time for a new unit.
Check out a Technics turntable...
Technics SL-1200 MK2
You'll find a pair of these in pretty much any club in the entire world. The design hasn't changed at all in over 20 years. It's a beautiful piece to behold, it's built like a tank. It weighs 26 pounds. And every single component, motors, tonearm, etc -- can all be replaced. These things are built to last.
This is how things used to be built. I can't think of anything new that I own that has the build quality of my turntables. And that's sad.
We've turned into a disposable society.
I refuse to buy most big brand names now. I've been burnt by just about everyone, mostly recently Microsoft and my xbox that died 3 weeks after the warranty was up.
My dad has a Mitsubishi 36 inch TV that he bought close to 14 years ago. It still works like a champ, no problems at all. I've got a 3 year old 36 inch Sony that I'm already seeing problems with.
I can't say exactly why this is happening, but I can venture some guesses. The quick buck is killing our economy. Everyone wants that easy money. No one takes pride in their products and builds them to last.
I recently looked at the feature lists of some home stereo equipment and was shocked. Most of the stuff on your average home stereo will never be used but you can't find simpler equipment. Additionally we are still using some pretty ugly wiring schemes for home audio. The back of my home theatre setup is insane! I have wires everywhere and while I'm usually good at labeling them, it's still a nightmare to work with.
No one is making these things better. They are making them cheaper and more complex. This goes against what people actually want. Features are nice, yes, but not at the expense of quality and ease of use.
Last January I purchased a Mitsubishi Platinum HDTV unit from a big-name electronics store. Just a few weeks ago (less than 11 months after purchase) the TV went out. Ugh, what a bummer!
The television repair person came out to diagnose the problem but couldn't figure it out - of course. So he took the guts out of the TV for diagnosing back at the shop. On his way out he mentioned that Mitisubishi has been having problems recently with the reliablilty of their picutre tubes so he thought that may be the problem. (hint #1 that these can be unreliable)
Come to find out that it was not the picture tube but the power supply of all things - my goodness, how hard is it to put a good quality power supply into a piece of electronic equipment that cost over $3k. (hint #2 that these can be unreliable)
Well at least I will be getting my TV put back together tomorrow and all it really cost me was time away from the big screen and my Tivo - which isn't really a bad thing. Luckily the extended service warranty paid off for once, didn't pay a cent.
Just as an aside I don't usually buy those extended warranties but it was less than %10 of the cost of the item and I don't consider this type of item a throw-away item - the author of the article considers his DVD player tossable after a year - this TV is a little different I think.
Just my $.02 - I had heard that Mitsubishi was pretty good in the realiability department on their TVs but personal experience has proven otherwise for me. We'll see how long until the next issue arises - hopefully long into the future.
Are you bovilexic? Moo!
Basically the premise is larger coporations eating smaller corporations, drive for profit leading to lack of quality standards and appreciation, more features to keep selling (who can survive if your product is only bought every 10-20 years)... There's more, but that's what the book is for, including giving a possible explanation as to why this came about in the first place, and why we let it continue to get worse.
FYI: Marvin Harris is not only probably one of the most influential Anthropologists of our time, but also writes many books (including this one) in a very easy to follow and understandable way.
Oh yes, how they have declined. Or at least I think so... they suck now and for some reason I assume that wasn't always the case.
I used to sell computers at Future Shop (a shitty Canadian retailer ala Best Buy in the US) and we would get shipments where head office would tell us to expect 1 in 10 to 1 in 6 be be defective right out of the box. At least twice, we got shipments where every other machine was defective. I started tracking returns and warrantee issues that would come back to the store and I would honestly estimate that some manufacturers (who rhyme with Bompaq and Baych-pee and eBachines) would hit over 25% defective units in the first year on some models.
Manufactures need to cut costs everywhere they can and quality just doesn't seem to matter. When I would get a serious geek (who was some how clueless enough to be in a Future Shop) I would quietly refer them to a local clone dealer with a rep for quality work and using good components
Unquestionably, everything is crap. My VCR took a dump recently...it was a semi-pro machine and was bought by a major cartoon studio in 1993. My husband and I wound up with it in 1996 or so. It had served us well up until a few weeks ago, when it ate a tape, belched, and wouldn't play anything anymore.
Trouble is, you can't really replace something like that anymore. Most VCRs are made in China, Malaysia, Indonesia or Korea, and are trash quality. I didn't have the heart to buy a piece of crap VCR and possibly risk the demise of more irreplaceable tapes.
I'm waiting for reasonable DVD recorders. Then I will get on the stick and dub all my tapes to DVD-R. (or +R if that shakes out as being the winner) Right now they are way too expensive.
BTW you can't guarantee getting something good if you buy Sony. Sony gets things made for them in China like everyone else does. And worst of all: they belong to the RIAA and MPAA.
I still can control quality on my computers by home-building, but I wonder how long that will last. Everything else...you roll the dice, you take the chance.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Check out
epinions. They review a sony video recorder and come up with this list:
Brands are listed starting from the most reliable (best) to least reliable (worst):
1. Panasonic - produced by Matsushita Electric
2. Quasar - also produced by Matsushita Electric
3. Samsung
4. Sanyo
5. Toshiba
6. Sharp
7. ProScan
8. GE
9. Hitachi
10. Philips
11. RCA
12. JVC
13. Symphonic
14. Emerson
15. SONY - isn't it too low for a "leader"?
16. Optimus (Radio Shack)
17. Mitsubishi
18. Zenith
19. Series LXI (Sears)
20. Fisher
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Back in the late 80's, I bought an inexpensive (corded) phone at Radio Shack. I was going to gut it to make my own lineman's handset. I pried the thing open with a pair of pliers and discovered, much to my surprise, a sizeable peice of metal attached to the inside of this phone. The was put in there to add weight to this peice of crap. Apparently, people would never buy the phone if it felt like the cheap peice of 3"x2" circuit board that really was!
It seems that this is quite common. Open up most any cheap handheld electronic gadget and you're likely to find a weight inside.
has the quality of high end consumer electronics declined?
cheap crap has always been available within a few months or at most a year of the wide availability of any new technology (the first year CD players costed an arm and a leg, but they probably are still working fine now, my first generation cheap CD player stopped reading CDs within a year and a half) but I find that some years back, if you bought the top of the line (or close to) model of a decent brand, odds were it would go strong for years and years and years.
Lately it seems, like others have said, that the discriminator between high and low price of a specific product is not reliability anymore, but just features, and the reliability is the same (usually not that great) all across the board.
Things are starting to get to the point that buying an extended 3 yrs 'no questions asked' replacement warranty is not the waste of money that it was some years ago.
In my personal experience good products are still obtainable, but getting fewer and fewer, off the top of my head: high-end HP printers (4xxx series), denon CD players, toshiba DVD players, toyota cars, bosh/whirlpool appliances, philips razors, you get the idea.
I really couldn't pick a TV, though, as I keep hearing horror stories about pretty much every projection TV out there, and direct view plasma HDTVs are way out of the reach of us common mortals pricewise...
-- the cake is a lie
Well, people are stupid, sure.
There have always been stupid people though. And there *is* a market for high-end audio today, perhaps even more so than in "the 70's", which I remember very clearly; I was a record collector in those days!
The thing is, the consumer does make a fairly safe bet -- at a certain price level, the difference usually IS features. We have all these little cheesy digital playback devices, nothing in the consumer arena that records worth a damn (maybe some of the video stuff can record decent audio? nah.) We reached an equilibrium for the consumer's ear as 16 bit audio became the norm. Hell, remember when talking toys had little phonographs in them? Now those things have a 16 bit DAC.
Consumers didn't care back then either. They wanted whatever was cheaper. Remeber credenza stereos? People selected those for their wood grains, not their quality. (Some of those things were kickass though).
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Really. When Best Buy and Circuit City have nothing but cheap shit on the shelves in the consumer entertainment department it's because that's exactly what people are willing to pay for. There used to be a middle range of devices, usually retailing just a little above the cheap stuff.
:)
These mid range units could generally be relied upon to perform well, have extra useful features, and lasted longer. As an example I had a Sony Hi8 camcorder from circa 1990 - a fabulous machine : Great optics, great mechanics, great sound, manual controls for everything, audio overdub functions, nice damped zoom control, it had the works. (It got stolen after 4 years, but by then it still worked as new.)
Sure it cost a bit more than the discount units available at the time, but in use you could certainly feel where those extra dollars went. It was also a lot cheaper than the high end pro video gear. All in all it was a nice compromise.
Nowadays the mid range is mostly gone - how could it be any different? The consumers buy the cheapest shit they can find, with everything automatic. You can't find camcorders with manual controls unless you go to the 'prosumer level' which is a relatively new high-strata tier with prices ranging close to that of pro gear. (Sony VX2000, Canon GL-1, XL-1, etc.)
It's my impression that the mid range market shrank in America as quality-oblivious people decided the budget units performed 'well enough', and simply picked which-ever nice-looking unit had the lowest price tag with a comparable feature set. The incentive to improve quality became less significant than the incentive to reduce price.
A circuit board in a black box is not just a circuit board in a black box, but who's to know if the thing works okay for a couple of months before it starts to die little by little?
There have been digital radio tuners for almost twenty years. Why do you think they still sell clock radios and boomboxes with mechanical turn-knob tuners?
The Japanese in particular, but also Europeans have been more quality conscious than Americans, and the mid-range segment still exists there. For example, the Europeans have for many years had an affordable mid-range 16:9 widescreen TV option with digital framedobler and picture stabilization, which is available to Americans only if they go all the way and buy the high-priced High Def sets.
For twenty years(!) Europeans have had digital ceefax teletype color text overlays on their TVs which lets users lookup program listings, news and weather information and much more from their remote controls. It's virtually indispensable even if it's low tech and looks like early 80s console game graphics, but Americans have never had anything as functional or useful of the kind until the advent of the digital cable box, Tivo, etc.
Europeans have NICAM digital near-CD-quality stereo audio to go with the PAL (*) TV picture, which by the way has higher resolution and much better colors than the Japanese/American NTSC format. Most American mom&pop&joe sixpack consumers get their stereo audio in crap quality from an analog audio carrier in the NTSC format. The new digital cable boxes improve the situation; but many many households still use 1980s or even 1970s technology, upon which they base their quality and performance expectations.
European electronics consumers have preferred direct two-way audio/video cables (SCART) to connect their VCRs and TVs in order to obtain the better picture afforded by not having the picture components squished together and lose quality by being re-modulated and de-modulated for the aerial connection: In the six years I stayed in the U.S., in the many different homes I visited, I saw most American home consumers connect their VCRs and even DVD players to the TV through aerial jacks.
Where I lived (Fairfax, VA) I had a nice home entertainment system setup. 120 channels of crap on TV to choose from, but the cable system employed analog UHF multiplexing technology from the 1970s (two stiff coaxials snaking from the wall to a decoder box with, I shit you not, fake wooden sides!) - The picture always had ghosts and noise and looked awful. The colors were washed out and the effective horizontal picture resolution was maybe 200 pixels. One day the picture looked so bad that I called in a cable guy to fix it. He probably thought I was some kind of euronazi crank because he said it looked just like everyone else's signal and nobody's complaining. With performance expectations as low as these, it's no wonder American consumer electronics are all basically worth exactly what you pay for.
Americans: If you want good stuff, smuggle some stuff home from Japan. Suffer the premium rates. They use mostly the same standards as you do, but their shit is -much- better, has more features, lasts longer.
Also, come visit Europe sometime, check out the cool shit we got you ain't got: 100hz TV picture steady as a rock, broadcast TV over aerial looking close to DVD quality; RDS car radios which continously retunes your receiver to the closest carrier broadcasting the program you're listening to, and your CD player pausing automatically for urgent traffic announcements; Ubiquitous, standardized GSM cellphones with SMS and always-on GPRS data services...
(*) By the way, pay no attention to the French with regards to home electronics. They're weird and speak French and use SECAM which sucks.
I totally agree. People cannot distinguish quality properly - they seem to confuse it with features, and I don't see how "quality" and "features" are related in any way.
Example: Less than 3 feet (1 metre) from me is a good-working GE table radio - built in 1960. Across from it is a fully calibrated oscilloscope and a signal generator - both built in the early 1950's, and working perfectly. (A 30-mHz range is plenty for audio and some radio work). My theory is that while individual component quality has gone up (resistors, capacitors, etc.) the overall ruggedness of design and construction has declined.
I used to do hi-fi repair for local shops; nowdays I prefer to deal in computers.
I fully agree that the technical literacy rate sucks; I have a manager who once told me that he wants a new computer with a 2 gigabyte chip...
and I kept a straight face.
I guess anything with scientific prefixes or suffixes attatched to its name triggers an odd sort of mental avoidance mechanism, similar to spastics. It's frustrating; the technical language and terminology is *not* that hard to figure out, if only people could pull themselves away from their cheap TV's for a few minutes with a dictionary.
C|N>K
Nowadays we shouldn't have to depend on salespeople to know every detail about every product I agree that they shouldn't, but a consumer should have access to a stats sheet on the quality of the product.
That having, been said, that was when you were paying $200-400 (1980 dollars) for a cheap component amp. If you go into a store where they charge you $400-$800 for a component amp (plus another $200-300 for the tuner), then I'd expect that they'd be happy to give you a full stats sheet.
Back when you were paying $700 for a CD player, they were happy to make them bullet proof, because they knew that, if they broke, you would bring them back for warranty repair and complain to everybody on the net (all 7000 of them) that the company was making garbage.
For my part, I still have my 14" Sony Color TV that I bought in 1986 as a computer monitor (for a Dragon 65 (COCO clone)). I paid $120 in 1999 to get the tuner fixed and it's still working just fine, thank you. The VCR got stolen in '93. Dunno what the lifespan for today's TVs are.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
Having worked for a semiconductor company that supplies chips for consumer electronics, I have a little insight.
First, consumer electronics makers are cheap. They will do ANYTHING to save a buck on the bill of materials. If this means skimping on a power supply, or ommitting some protection circuits, they will do it. Their goals are 1) regulatory compliance (UL in the US) and 2) low RMA's.
Secondly, the consumer cannot distinguish "quality." They things that the consumer can see have no real relation to the quality of the design. How would you know if they power supply is very ripply? How would you know that they left out some filter capacitors. Price or brand is no indicator, that's all driven by marketting. For the consumer to determine the quality, they would have to take apart the device and then analyze it like an engineer. Doesn't happen. Reviews don't help-- the reviewer doesn't know anything either. Think of the quality test most consumers do of a stereo: they go to the store and turn up the volume. What does that tell them?
Also, the electronics that you buy today are considerably more complicated than that of yesteryear. Consider a stereo. Twenty years ago, it was just a collection of transistors and power supplies. Now they have micro controllers, DSP, codec's, etc. There is a lot more to go wrong. Pluse a lot more corner cutting that you can do. Besides, once you throw software into the mix, you get bugs.
Lastly, buy the $49 APEX DVD player. The part that will fail is going to be the DVD mechanism. Do you think there is a big difference between the one APEX buys and the one Sony buys? They're probably both made by TEAC.