I had a similar experience while buying a new 40" LED Samsung smart TV for my new home
Got a very good deal from the dealer but I did not take the delivery immediately but booked it by paying 1000 bucks as advance :licklips:
On the day of billing and delivery asked the salesman to show the TV to check the panel usage hours. He said the stock is not available and they would procure it from their pallavaram branch and would get the TV delivered in the evening :indifferent14: Felt something fishy but wanted to wait till the TV gets delivered
The TV got delivered and the SAMSUNG installation engineer came shortly and installed the wall mount and mounted the TV :yahoo: But in the joy of getting the TV forgot to note why the TV powered on without the initial setup and it just slipped my mind to get into the service menu to check the panel hours :sad:
Moment the engineer left my place, accessed the service menu and was shocked to see the panel hours count as 36. On top of that Under the network setting saw a router named "Suresh Rao" before I could make the network settings
This made me furious and called the engineer right away and explained the issue. The guy was very polite and courteous enough to call the dealer and conveyed the issue. I made a call to the dealer and blasted them and reported the issue. The salesman called me back and apologized and tried to sell a story stating that was a gift TV which was wrongly delivered and in 2 days of time he would get me a fresh piece.
Next day, I got a call from the dealer and said they managed to procure a fresh piece from trichy. I again blasted them for trying to cheat me. They apologized again with the same story. Got the new piece opened in front of me, there were no finger prints, it was double covered with plastic and bubble wrapped, saw the setup menu initializing and checked the panel hours and was really glad (peace of mind with no wifi router names this time
) to see the panel hours to 0. Immediately noted down the serial number on the back and took a snap of it. Once the new TV was delivered and the old one was taken back, checked the serial number again and it matched the one in the snap.
Just thought if the dealer tries to con educated customers like us what would be case of customers with little to no awareness on the panel usage hours :sad: