Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Circuit City - Never Again!
Posted by Suhit Gupta in "THOUGHT" @ 08:00 AM
Last week Jason posted on his tale of woe regarding his Fujitsu laptop and I wrote a short excerpt of my problem with my Sony TV but I figured it would be a good idea to explain the whole situation, maybe saving some of you out there from making mistakes like I did.
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So I needed to buy a DVD player on New Years Eve 2000 (going onto 2001) because I wanted to watch a couple of movies and happened to go to Circuit City (the 14th Street Union Square store). At that time they had a promotion that if one bought a 26" TV or bigger, you would get a free DVD player. This I felt was the perfect opportunity to upgrade my crappy 20" TV so I purchased a Sony Wega 32" on Dec. 31st 2000 - the biggest mistake of my life.
I basically spent a largish chunk from my savings, putting down over $1500 to buy the TV, the DVD player (free), NY State tax, the Circuit City Extended Warranty and shipping. I used to live on Roosevelt Island at the time (small island between Manhattan and Queens, the island where Spiderman had his final showdown with the Green Lantern in Spiderman I). The TV arrived the next day and I was very happy. I hooked it up to my speakers, making it the center of my living room. I lived in this apartment for 1.5 years more (no problems at all) and then moved to my current apartment - Manhattan, 32nd Street and 5th ave - right next to the Empire State Building. TV continued to work fine for four-five months and I often wondered if it was ever worth paying for the extended warranty. (I will refer to Circuit City as CC from now, also, if you want to download the high res version of all the images that you are going to see in this rant instead of clicking on the link, click here).
The problem
My question was soon answered when in late December 2002 (two years after I bought the TV) the problems started. At first there was occassional clicking in the set with a slight fuzziness/snowy screen, perhaps once a day or two. It was so rare that I did not pay attention thinking that it was just something random. But by the time January rolled around, the reception was awful, the picture was snowy all the time and all vertical lines in the TV were wavy. [Note that now the problem is continuous and every there are funky colored large vertical color bars that will appear on the screen every few minutes]. So I called Time Warner Cable thinking it was a cable problem but over the course of a couple of months, they replaced almost every single part of cabling and equipment in my apartment and the problem continued. After removing every other variable (in fact we plugged the DVD player directly to the TV, and did the same with the VCR, removing all other equipment from the equation, and the problem persisted), they narrowed it down to the TV. Since then, by the way, I have isolated the TV with only the DVD player, the VCR, my Playstation, Nintendo 64 and Xbox and have been able to replicate the same exact problem - fuzziness, snow, wavy lines. I have also tried moving the TV into separate rooms in my apartment and plugging it into different power outlets just to rule out the possibility of it being a power fluctuation problem. Anyways, I called CC tech support.
(800x533) (1600x1066)
(800x533) (1600x1066)
So I needed to buy a DVD player on New Years Eve 2000 (going onto 2001) because I wanted to watch a couple of movies and happened to go to Circuit City (the 14th Street Union Square store). At that time they had a promotion that if one bought a 26" TV or bigger, you would get a free DVD player. This I felt was the perfect opportunity to upgrade my crappy 20" TV so I purchased a Sony Wega 32" on Dec. 31st 2000 - the biggest mistake of my life.
I basically spent a largish chunk from my savings, putting down over $1500 to buy the TV, the DVD player (free), NY State tax, the Circuit City Extended Warranty and shipping. I used to live on Roosevelt Island at the time (small island between Manhattan and Queens, the island where Spiderman had his final showdown with the Green Lantern in Spiderman I). The TV arrived the next day and I was very happy. I hooked it up to my speakers, making it the center of my living room. I lived in this apartment for 1.5 years more (no problems at all) and then moved to my current apartment - Manhattan, 32nd Street and 5th ave - right next to the Empire State Building. TV continued to work fine for four-five months and I often wondered if it was ever worth paying for the extended warranty. (I will refer to Circuit City as CC from now, also, if you want to download the high res version of all the images that you are going to see in this rant instead of clicking on the link, click here).
The problem
My question was soon answered when in late December 2002 (two years after I bought the TV) the problems started. At first there was occassional clicking in the set with a slight fuzziness/snowy screen, perhaps once a day or two. It was so rare that I did not pay attention thinking that it was just something random. But by the time January rolled around, the reception was awful, the picture was snowy all the time and all vertical lines in the TV were wavy. [Note that now the problem is continuous and every there are funky colored large vertical color bars that will appear on the screen every few minutes]. So I called Time Warner Cable thinking it was a cable problem but over the course of a couple of months, they replaced almost every single part of cabling and equipment in my apartment and the problem continued. After removing every other variable (in fact we plugged the DVD player directly to the TV, and did the same with the VCR, removing all other equipment from the equation, and the problem persisted), they narrowed it down to the TV. Since then, by the way, I have isolated the TV with only the DVD player, the VCR, my Playstation, Nintendo 64 and Xbox and have been able to replicate the same exact problem - fuzziness, snow, wavy lines. I have also tried moving the TV into separate rooms in my apartment and plugging it into different power outlets just to rule out the possibility of it being a power fluctuation problem. Anyways, I called CC tech support.
(800x533) (1600x1066)
