[opendtv] Re: Growing uncomfortable with Samsung
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 07:19:19 -0500
At 6:14 PM -0500 1/20/05, Manfredi, Albert E wrote:
>Craig Birkmaier wrote:
>
>> Sounds like I need to call Samsung and make them
>> come out to look at it.
>
>The take-away from this thread being, if a CE
>product has to be "rebooted" once every few days,
>you assume something must be wrong. And you call
>a service technician.
No Bert. Pay attention.
The need to reboot was simply an observation, that CE products are
becoming so dependent on software that they can crash too. When I
wrote that message i was NOT thinking about calling for service.
BUT. I decided to go to the Samsung support website to see if they
could shed some light on the problem. THAT is where I found the
information that is leading me to call for service.
I learned that at least one of what I thought was a software crash
incident, may have been related to overheating - i.e. improper
operation of the fan that cools the light source. The Samsung FAQ
suggests that I call for service if I am experiencing this problem.
I also looked at a FAQ about poor quality for analog sources that
causes noisy pictures and what they called pixelation. Once again,
they state that if this is a problem I need to have a service rep
look at the set.
Now that I know the codes for the three status LEDS on the font of
the set, I should be able to diagnose the problem better the next
time the set crashes (hopefully without burning too).
I can then determine if a service call is needed.
>
>If a PC behaves in approximately the same way,
>it's business as usual.
I would NOT accept this kind of performance for ANY product. That is
one of the major reasons that I will not buy a PC. My Mac has not
crashed, in the month that I have owned the Samsung TV.
Maybe if Microsoft was more interested in developing reliable
products, that controlling whatever they touch, PCs would not have
this bad reputation.
>Perhaps that's why TVs aren't designed like PCs.
Unfortunately, Bert, the differences between a PC and a TV are
growing smaller as both converge around the same commodity components:
From the Sony article I posted this morning:
"Prices are falling faster than we could have imagined a few years
ago," Sony's chief financial officer, Katsumi Ihara, said Thursday.
The reason prices have been declining so rapidly is the ready
availability of the crucial components of the latest digital products
- like flat displays, hard drives and control chips - which makes it
easier for new competitors to quickly come up with products of their
own, he said.
The legacy design philosophies that have driven the CE industry are
beginning to hit the wall. Dumb single function products are
struggling to compete against newer digital media appliances that
work well in the connected digital home. The CE industry has no core
competency in this area. The President of Sony seemed almost in awe
of Steve Jobs when they appeared together at the MacWorld keynote. He
openly acknowledged that the Japanese do not know how to create great
software.
But it is NOT just a question of writing embedded code to run a
product. There are hundreds of MP3 players that do just this. But
they are all struggling because Apple designed a complete
infrastructure for digital music, not just an MP3 player. Sony tried
to do the same and they blew it.
Regards
Craig
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