Might seem like a philosophical question but hear me out..
I had a Panasonic plasma TH-42PV8D bought in 2009 for 46K INR.
This week one cursed day, it refused to start and would just sit there blinking twice.
Long story short - service technician visits - says it is a "back light issue". However to repair it, the parts are no longer being manufactured since Panasonic has exited the plasma business.
He then offered me some hope that the company may offer a trade-in after factoring in depreciation; but a few days later, even that is retracted. So basically if i can lay it face up, it is an expensive coffee table.
I've escalated up the panasonic chain but not too hopeful.
In my family I have had a couple of 50+ inch LCD Samsung screens go kaput within 1-4 years.
- So it seems the televisions are not being made as they used to.
- The cost is huge
- Service is questionable. Repairs are pricey/impossible.
So now I'm wrestling with whether it makes to go big-50K+ again or go for a smaller cheaper set, knowing that its days are numbered.
Thanks
Apologies in advance - I have the exact opposite point of view on this. You also have to take into account that the TV price is relative to what people are earning in that era, what people are paying for other things like cars, clothes, cars, etc.
By most measures, people's incomes have doubled since 2009 if not tripled, and has easily increased 10x since 1990s. When you paid 20-30k for your Trinitron in the 90s which was "built to last 20 years", you basically paid the equivalent of 200k for that TV.
Now it can be argued how durable your current day 200k TV is going to be, but more importantly, the 50k you are spending today for your TV is equivalent of spending 5k on a TV in 1990s or 2000.
If anything, TVs have become super cheap, and the quality you get at most price points is phenomenal value compared to the price. Yes of course, they have skimped on cost where they can which also means they skimped on quality and durability. But truth is, people want to upgrade their TVs every 5 years nowadays. Nobody wants to keep a dinosaur.
One can make a "old is gold" luddite kind of argument and it probably even works for very selective things like amplifiers and speakers, but I honestly do not think it works at all for TVs. You could probably cherry pick a Panasonic plasma TV from the yesteryears and compare it to some average LCD TV of today and the plasma would probably still stand out. But then the true comparison would be against an LG OLED TV with 4k HDR, and the differences are night and day, even including the much vaunted "deep black levels".
To reiterate, I do not mean to offend at all with my post. And like i said, apologies in advance. My only intent is to present another point of view. But I very often see this myth persisting of "old is gold" and honestly in most cases related to electronics, it is not true at all. Things are built to a price - that is what engineering and manufacturing is all about. The only reason things lasted much longer earlier is because, guess what, they were super expensive. Manufacturers built super expensive things back in the day because very few people could afford it in the first place, and the ones that did wanted quality.
Today, everyone wants a flat screen TV - it is not a "rich person's toy" at all. Of course, there's a price gradient in flat screen TVs as well and the price-performance ratio also varies drastically across the spectrum, but the truth also is that technology evolves so rapidly that people have realized it just does not make sense to hold on to electronic devices for more than a few years. Your cellphone, your computer, your TV, your AVR, all become rapidly obsolete. That Nokia 3310 that was built like a tank - it is utterly obsolete today. And for good reason too.
If you watch a Netflix or Amazon Prime 4k HDR streaming video, such as Mozart In The Jungle - it is a thing of beauty to behold. There is no way at all 720p non-HDR content and TV would even come close to that level of quality. And a couple of years down the line, these 4k HDR TVs will also become cheap as chips.
. Brightness is still intact, so I presume Tube is OK. Average life of CRT can be said to about 15/20 years.
