After taking delivery of the TV, we noticed it had bright lower left and right corners that we later found out were due to new packaging that pinched the TV and caused most of the TVs in that batch to be ruined. Samsung claimed that the corners were "in spec" and refused to replace the TV. Thankfully the retailer replaced the TV.
I vowed that I'd never purchase another Samsung product. I've stuck to that, but a house I just bought has all Samsung appliances, which I'm not looking forward to.
They have steadfastly refused to fix my fridge's ice maker even though they have admitted it's a design fault, and retailers will not take it back as faulty because the ice maker is not considered vital to the functioning of the refrigerator in general.
It's still working now, ten years post-purchase.
It's prevented me from buying to replace a lot of my stuff.
It would be a good way to decide which products to buy. Is this (equivalent) model sold in New Zealand? If so, it's probably known by the manufacturer to be solid. If not, avoid it at all costs.
* It will cost x to fix this, as a gesture we will share the inflated repair cost with you 50/50.
* We don't make this model anymore but we have an identical model with a different serial number, we can offer you that at a "discount".
* We found the item had water damage and this is not covered in our warranty, even when we advertised these items being used in water.
* We are happy to repair the item but first we need to have the item inspected by a repair agent to see how the fault occurred. Please be aware if we find the fault is caused by you, then you agree to pay x dollar value amount even if we do not repair item (because you were at fault)
* Item spends many weeks being assessed for repair. Doesn't get repaired, sent back. Repeat.
.. and many more.
Only when you stand firm and start spouting the legal requirements do they suddenly resolve the situation VERY quickly.
I dealt with dodgy Samsung fridges and they tried to "share" the repair cost with me. I politely declined, then sent them an email citing my legal rights. Samsung then repaired the fridge promptly and no longer tried to talk with me about sharing costs of repair.
Most consumers fall for the tricks above or give up and buy a new item.
I don't think international companies care too much, they are adept selling to the masses. Those that cite the rules to get a repair are likely to be a tiny minority.
There is another aspect of the law which is less known. It is not actually Samsung or large manufacturer on the hook for consumer guarantee. It is the retailer. The retailer has to remedy the situation. If Samsung packs up operations, the retailer still needs to stand by the product it sold. This means that the retailer has an incentive to work with more reliable manufacturers and suppliers and will promptly ditch troublesome suppliers.
Wonder how long until our politicians take it away.
> we pay more for things than people overseas do
This sounds wonderfully cyclical. "Why do I expect my washer to last an extra year? Because it cost 10% more than the one sold in America, which is expected to last a decade".
Isn't that they just force you to buy extended warranty on everything?
The last two refrigerators I bought had dependable ice makers.
I just overheard an installer talking to a neighbor while installing his refrigerator.
The tech said most modern refrigerations only last 10 years at best though.
See: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxpjy/hacker-bypasses-ges-r... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22129801
I checked some list prices, and they're a substantial price of the fridge itself. Some site said $200-$450 to replace one, another said the part itself is $100-$500 without even including labor. At those prices, I can see why people might just buy new. It's also something most people would want to hire a professional for; refrigerants are not good to inhale, and this needs to be air-tight.
I would also hope that most of them get refurbished. It's pretty hard to just "discard" a fridge. You have to call someone at the city (or GoodWill), and I presume they sell those to refurbisher. They're worth some money.
So I think in reality, it goes to a refurbisher who fixes it, then sells it to someone else who replaces and even older fridge. So the fridge that actually ends up in a landfill might be a 1960s deep freeze. The same idea as used cars.
It took me four broken machines to find a model without that exact same design flaw...
It seems a lot of the problems with these kind of products is that most customers use them quite little, and so they don't see a major fallout even for problems that'd be trivial to fix (many of the ice maker models in question has a switch to stop rotation too far in the opposite direction) and so it just gets ignored.
My ice maker has been working fine for over 15 years. My mother's ice maker has been working fine for about 25 years.
I spent a weekend pulling it out, thawing everything out, and then replacing the defroster coil, thinking that would fix it. It didn't -- it worked for about a week afterwards until freezing over again.
So in short, it seems that they can neither make a proper ice maker nor ice un-maker :-)
Admittedly, this is all down to personal experience and taste but I am decidedly anti-samsung. I've had a few decent computer monitors from them but otherwise everything I've owned from them has become e-waste with far too much rapidity for the price paid.
My Samsung refrigerator had the display fail after two years, and the replacement display started failing in a month. I no longer bother buying replacement displays because everyone else agrees they never last more than a few months.
No more Samsung appliances for me, ever. And CR's credibility took a major hit in my eyes because I bought the washer & dryer on their recommendation, even after I already knew that Samsung refrigerators were garbage.
The dryers are the worst. They use a plastic tensioner pulley for the belt, but the pulley doesn't have a bearing...it just rides on a metal sleeve. This eventually wears out and causes the belt to fly off.
The washers have this issue I think due to incompatible metals (aluminum mounting to the stainless drum maybe) that causes them to break after about 5 years.
On my dryer it took less than a year before it tossed the belt.
I have avoided Samsung products since then.
You used to see this with car brands back when everybody worried about reliability. Somebody would hear a bad story and go round saying "Don't buy BMWs because their fuel injectors fail". Fortunately, most people have goldfish memory, so people still buy Ford cars despite the Ford Pinto's fuel tank fires and they still buy Toyota despite the Prius's uncontrolled acceleration or whatever.
I can offer this with a Bosh. If you get a E13 error it's the pump.
It's a pretty easy fix. You can get a generic pump for $50.
Most disguarded Bosh washers are due to a pump. The computer is second on the list. It's not worth fixing if it's the board.
I've been meaning to put a fan on my washer's computer board. There us definitely room in there for a computer fan.
Edit: I’m getting downvoted. Is this a well known thing not to wash small items? (I’ve been using washing machines for 20 years, without a problem until this one.)
Front loaders specifically - though usually to protect the objects being washed, not the machine itself. The joint around the door tends to pinch small objects. I put masks in a mesh bag meant for washing "delicates"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEDxRY4xcCI
Life is Good indeed.
Never again!
We need to use legislation and taxation to push for every longer-lived appliances.
I have an HE top loader. It uses just as little water, but it can wash a lot more clothes when needed. I can push a button and it stops being HE and can fill its tub up to wash blankets and comforters.
Also front loaders just can't clean synthetic fabrics that water beads off of. I've seen fabrics come out of a front loader almost completely dry because the tiny bit of water that is used can't even penetrate the outer layer of fabric. Mostly my Ikea comforters, I put one in a front loader I used to have and after a complete wash cycle it wasn't even damp, and it was still very dirty.
Finally, front loaders are mechanically more complex. For one, if that seal fails, well, it leaks. The simplicity of a Top loaders means they can last longer, and in the very least top loaders don't get all gunked up around the door seal. I have seen so many front loaders that smell awful because no one ever cleans the crud out of the seal, ick!
Aside from space savings, I really don't get the point of a front loader at all. Maybe the tumbling action is better at some types of cleaning?
It should be noted that in many places in the US that hanging clothes outside is either not allowed, or impractical. Also I've had some really bad nights (baby) where I needed to wash and dry all my bedding twice over, so having a, rather fast, dryer was nice.
Seriously though, if you need to wash a large comforter, what do you do? I haven't seen a front loader large enough to fit a proper comforter in. Something like http://canyon-sports.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/91YEVCAn...
In America, you can buy top loaders or front loaders. Front loaders are popular in condos and apartments because you can stack them with a dryer.
Regarding the sizing again, I’ve never had a problem. I’ve also never heard of anybody washing a comforter (although I don’t call it a comforter so maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean). A comforter (or duvet) has a cover on it and you wash the cover.
If the machine is stuffed full this doesn't work, the water gets caught in some fold of the clothing and you end up with 1 damp spot and an otherwise dry duvet.
I Air BnB'd my way around the UK, the washing machines in the places I stayed were generally tiny, like smaller than anything I've even seen in the US, but that could've just been an artifact of me staying in Air BnBs.
They all did share the trait of getting the clothing seemingly scorching hot to dry it though. :/
American top loading machines are generally huge. Now days they have sensors to detect how much water they really need to use, so they aren't going through LMAOWTFBBQ gallons of water like they did when I was a kid.
None of the front loaders I’ve used has had a problem with that. Are you sure the one data point you apparently have experience with wasn't just an older and/or relatively low-quality front-loader?
> Aside from space savings, I really don't get the point of a front loader at all.
They are easier to get stuff out of than a top loader of similar size, particularly for larger ones. I’ve also never seen a top loader with a steam cycle, though I guess its possible they exist.
The big reason I prefer them though: I can put a counter top above them for folding laundry and things.
They are an absolute pain in the ass to keep clean and odor free though.
https://money.cnn.com/2016/11/04/news/companies/samsung-expl...
That cracks me up.
Thats what a decent company would do.
That is how defects like this normally work, if I buy a $$$$ monitor, you better bet I expect not to have dead pixels, if I do I want them to replace it.
Then they sell it has Open Box or B Grade Referb to a customer that is fine with a few dead pixels in order to get a deal on the unit...
This made me swear off Samsung forever. Don't mess with my stuff I bought years ago.
Thankfully we're not yet at the point where my xbox one or PS4 will give it a DHCP lease, NAT and default route/gateway outbound and 100Mbps ethernet over the HDMI cable .
I worked on the team who built Samsung’s initial smart TV experience back in 2009 and yet I’m the exact same as you with every TV I own. If I could get the same quality panel and video processing without “smart TV” functionality for a reasonable price, I would, but they generally are much more expensive. My choice of panel is intended to last me 5 years, the last thing I would want is to be stuck with 5 year old “smart” tech that usually is abandonware shortly after purchase. It’s just to easy to buy a separate box (AppleTV in my case) and get a better experience and easy upgrade ability as new stuff comes out without wasting a perfectly good multi-thousand dollar panel.
That's been my strategy too, and so far, so good. We treat the TV as dumb. Getting a 75 inch screen that isn't a 'smart TV' is dang near impossible.
https://www.windowscentral.com/gigabyte-allows-returns-or-ex...
That's from gigabyte's response, not the accusations levied against them. In GN's testing, they found that the PSU failed at 60% load after 72 hours: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aACtT_rzToI&t=1427s
There's a Be Quiet unit in there now like the rest of the PCs in my place.
I will not buy another Gigabyte / Aorus card for that reason.
Just the power supplies are dog crap.
Fortunately Afterburner will let you take control of the fan etc with a custom profile.
It's easy to imagine a time when the TV includes it's own 5G modem or that Samsung would make a deal with Amazon or Comcast for access to their wifi mesh networks so the TV can get online without user intervention.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/amazon-devices-will-...
I highly doubt that. Rolling out this network is a lot of work and I'm nearly 100% certain this is to reduce claims of non-working devices caused by bad WiFi, plus maybe the option to sell network access on a wide range of devices.
Avoiding blocked network for TVs and other "smart" appliances is surely a nice benefit, but I doubt even 1% of people actually block network access (hell, most probably want it!). There's no way Amazon would pour that amount of effort into extracting that minuscule piece of tracking data.
I only know about LGs but they have a service remote that you can use to change the region. Maybe Samsung has a similar thing?
You often have access to it, it's just a higher price (sometimes double) because it isn't subsidized by advertising.
The way larger component is due to effects of scale which punishes products that run in small batches, and the effect that the "business" version of something is usually more expensive, but available with higher quality, than the consumer version.
Building the TV receiver part shouldn't be too difficult. Perhaps someone could write a blog about it.
I have looked in to fixing a new but broken pc monitor that way but it would end up the same cost as a new monitor, at least in my case.
Technically, all you should have to do is not enable Wifi/Ethernet and you're good to go. But I wouldn't put it past Samsung to look for open APs or connected Samsung products and secretly funnel data via that channel.
Coming soon: movie rooms housed inside faraday cages.
I never once touched any of the smart features and it has been fine so far. This has been my rule for any devices that requires WIFI. I should really setup a special guest network for them and disable WAN access but I haven't gotten that far yet.
Of course I don't know your usage of it, but generally there is nothing worth downloading in those firmwares, only potentially new ways to serve ads and be obtrusive if facing issues with that. You don't want your previously-OK TV to start showing you some warnings after updating it.
It's terrible though. We really live in a panopticon now.
Any links?
Not exactly the TV manufacturer doing it, but there have been reports of advertisers using ultrasonic pitches to do cross-device tracking.
Be careful which apps you allow to use your phone's microphone.
Slightly different than what gp was talking about but also deals with using invisible audio for DRM
AFAIK, the only mainstream streaming device that doesn't do this is Apple TV.
In the end I bought a broken Samsung 32" 1080p mostly dumb TV on ebay for £0.99, fixed it (power supply capacitor problem) and steal all my content and ship it on USB sticks to the TV which will quite happily play h264 / mp3 encoded stuff.
Fuck the whole industry.
Is there a list of such manufactures? Don't want to accidentally buy one of their products.
Of course google and other spy companies are pushing DNS over HTTPS, so once that becomes popular in these devices, you're screwed - you simply have to block all traffic (in which case you won't be able to watch netflix/disney/whatever using that device. For a TV that's fine, as you have a PC plugged into it, for now)
BTW, Roku supported the Radio Roku service for 10 years after the SoundBridge was discontinued, plus the device isn't locked down -- there are community-based efforts which still let you use an old SoundBridge, with a little effort. However, I'd argue that SoundBridge-era Roku is a VERY different company than streaming video-era Roku.
Hooked it up to my Nvidia Shield, configured HDMI-CEC and it's everything i want for a TV, all it does is turn on and display the shield while passing through audio to my receiver haven't seen the Samsung UI in months.
I have a smart TV (of another brand) that I am very happy with, and while I don't really use the built-in apps, they are quite decent and – importantly – don't get in the way of me using the TV as a HDMI sink exclusively.
It even got native AirPlay support via a software update three years after its original market launch, something I'd absolutely not expect and was quite pleasantly surprised by.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jae-yong_(businessman)#201...