Bought an HD-TV: Waste of Money

[Rii]

Don't buy that Magnavox Shit-box BD player.. It can't even do BD-live.. So that means it can't use internet for updates.. Spend a few more bucks and get a real player.. Something with an ethernet jack in the back.

Why anyone would want to give Sony et al. the ability to brick their player by remote is beyond me.

That's right. My player has played every Blu-ray new release I have (mainly from Netflix). Not one single instance of inability to play.

Whenever I go to play a Blu-Ray on my PS3 the system asks if I want to enable BD-Live. I'm always vaguely tempted to click 'yes' just to see what inane bullshit it comes up with, but inevitably my desire to actually watch the film wins out.

Maybe George Lucas could use it to update the Star Wars films on the fly: "Your edition of "The Phantom Menace" is out of date, please update to build 1633 which incorporates various script and editing improvements."

 

[Captain Ice]

The entitlement is something you are projecting, nobody said anything about feeling entitled to anything, but rather seeing what you can get.

See it's the "seeing what you can get" thing that bothers me. All you're (general) doing is exploiting your (general) power to get what you want. If a store's rules are you cannot return open-box items then that's their rule. Bitching about it, arguing about it, or climbing up the power chain is just stamping your feet until you get your way no matter how civil you are in doing it. The rule is the rule is the rule.

Agreed. This is also what bothers me as a customer. Why? Because it makes it that much harder for those who have legitimate complaints to get them heard and resolved.

Trekker, there are also times when those rules should be waived not because you're going to lose a customer, but because it's the right thing to do. For instance, you're thinking about purchasing something (say for example an HDTV), and you go to the stores website to check things out. While you are there, you find a model that you like for $999. You print out the page and head for the nearest store, where the price on the shelf is $1049. But you don't notice that until after you've paid the bill and you're putting it in your car. When you go back in and ask the clerk to honor their own store's online price, they respond with "It's against our policy to do that." Wouldn't you then ask the manager to bend that rule?

For the rest of you, I'll give you a different example. Yesterday, during the first quarter of the game I called a local pizzeria. I ordered two pizzas and gave them a credit card over my landline to pay for it. Five minutes later, an ad for Papa John's comes up, advertising any large pizza you want for $10. I've just ordered two medium pizzas and paid $34 for them. So, I call the shop back and tell them to cancel the order, to which the girl asks why and offers to get the manager to lower their price to $24 plus the tax when I tell her, as otherwise he's already out the pies which are in the oven. I'm ok with this since their product is much superior to anything the chains have.

When the pies arrive, I discover the shop forgot to charge my card. It's also not on file in their system. So now their manager wants his driver to read the card number over the phone. It's a cell phone. When I tell him he's not going to do that, he wants the driver to handwrite the card number on his delivery/tip log and bring it in. I tell the driver no, head in and call the shop on the wired landline phone I had used earlier. The sales girl then starts to give me a whole list of excuses, it's not my faults, etc. I demand to speak to a manager. When he comes on the phone, I give him the number and he promises to send the driver right back out with the receipt.

At that point, I probably would have had the pies for free if I had wanted. But, they were already going out of their way and bending their prices to get the sale. The guy's got the right to make a little money, right people?

 

[Pingfah]

If my numbers look bad I have to raise prices to ensure they look good next month.

We're not talking about returning meat here, the guy was talking about returning opened but hardly used electrical items to a massive department store.

And the store cannot legally sell that opened item as new, meaning they have to sellit as a "used" or "open box" item, meaning they have to either sell it at a lower profit or at or below cost, which means this hurts their numbers forcing them to raise prices somewhere else to compensate.

The entitlement is something you are projecting, nobody said anything about feeling entitled to anything, but rather seeing what you can get.

See it's the "seeing what you can get" thing that bothers me. All you're (general) doing is exploiting your (general) power to get what you want. If a store's rules are you cannot return open-box items then that's their rule. Bitching about it, arguing about it, or climbing up the power chain is just stamping your feet until you get your way no matter how civil you are in doing it. The rule is the rule is the rule.

And, yes, people with more power can break them but that doesn't change the fact that the rule is there for a reason, it's not there as a hurdle for people to jump over to get to what they want.

Regardless, if you can get them to break the rule just to keep you happy, then it wasn't a hard and fast rule, so I don't know what you are complaining about.

Shops don't have to do shit, it's up to them.

Someone writes "be persistant" and you read "acting like a dick" and being a "petulant toddler". Into "see what you can get" you read bitching, arguing and exploiting. Nobody suggested taking anything LIKE that sort of attitude.

There's little point trying to engage you here frankly.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

[ For instance, you're thinking about purchasing something (say for example an HDTV), and you go to the stores website to check things out. While you are there, you find a model that you like for $999. You print out the page and head for the nearest store, where the price on the shelf is $1049. But you don't notice that until after you've paid the bill and you're putting it in your car.

If you don't notice how much a thing costs before you buy it, then why is that the store's fault?

I discover the shop forgot to charge my card. It's also not on file in their system. So now their manager wants his driver to read the card number over the phone. It's a cell phone. When I tell him he's not going to do that, he wants the driver to handwrite the card number on his delivery/tip log and bring it in. I tell the driver no, head in and call the shop on the wired landline phone I had used earlier. The sales girl then starts to give me a whole list of excuses, it's not my faults, etc. I demand to speak to a manager. When he comes on the phone, I give him the number and he promises to send the driver right back out with the receipt.

*That* is a better example.

 

[Trekker4747]

Shops don't have to do shit, it's up to them.

Shops don't have to charge you anything for stuff, doesn't mean if you go in there and "be presistant" enough they should give you stuff for free.

Someone writes "be persistant" and you read "acting like a dick" and being a "petulant toddler". Into "see what you can get" you read bitching, arguing and exploiting. Nobody suggested taking anything LIKE that sort of attitude.

Because I deal with this stuff all of the time. And my "acting like a dick" and "petulant toddler" are nothing more than severe semantics to decribe people who keep insisting and insisting I break the rules for them. Had a guy once, well dressed, very "charming" try and charm his way through the rules with broad smiles, laughs, jokes and stuff like that. Wanted me to give him a deal on something -beyond the deal I was already giving with him. I call that acting like a child and being a dick. No, he wasn't yelling, cursing, making broad jestures or doing anything of the sort. He just thought he was entitled to rules being broken for him just because.

Sorry, that doesn't wash for me. There are plenty of times when you can bend rules or break them, but doing them just because people smarm their way up the food chain isn't one of them.

A store owes you nothing if you return an HDTV because you don't have the equipment to take advantage of it. There's no reason why they should waive a restocking fee because you didn't do the research before going in on a multi-hundred dollar purchase. That's your fault.

However, I once went to Best Buy to return a MASH DVD set I had just bought the day before. The DVD set was so poorly made that the holders for the DVDs themselves scratched the hell out of them to the point where they were unusable. (This is a known problem with this DVD set.)

The Clerk told me that she couldn't refund my money, only exchange the item. When she brought me the replacement one I opned it up there on the counter, showed her the discs as they too were scratched up. She got the manager to approve giving me a cash refund. Because that circumstance was one where the store couldn't satisfy me per their own rules. I bought something that was unusable to me and the repalcement was unusable as well.

But, if I had gone in there and decided to work my way up to reutrn this item simply because I didn't want it? I would deserve nothing.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Which M*A*S*H set are you meaning, BTW? Is it one of the season sets, or the complete series set?

 

[Trekker4747]

^ Which M*A*S*H set are you meaning, BTW? Is it one of the season sets, or the complete series set?

It was the complete series "Martinis and Medicine" set the one that comes in a big green army-looking case.

The backing to the "pockets" the DVDs slid into inside the case was a very rough-feeling cardboard. It had scratched the DVDs up pretty good. They looked like someone rubbed them on Klinger's ass.

I did some reading on the set and it seems this is a problem many people had with this set.

 

[Saturn0660]

Don't buy that Magnavox Shit-box BD player.. It can't even do BD-live.. So that means it can't use internet for updates.. Spend a few more bucks and get a real player.. Something with an ethernet jack in the back.

Why anyone would want to give Sony et al. the ability to brick their player by remote is beyond me.

That's right. My player has played every Blu-ray new release I have (mainly from Netflix). Not one single instance of inability to play.

Fair enough... However, when you buy something that has ZERO features what would there be to update...

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Which M*A*S*H set are you meaning, BTW? Is it one of the season sets, or the complete series set?

It was the complete series "Martinis and Medicine" set the one that comes in a big green army-looking case.

The backing to the "pockets" the DVDs slid into inside the case was a very rough-feeling cardboard. It had scratched the DVDs up pretty good. They looked like someone rubbed them on Klinger's ass.

I did some reading on the set and it seems this is a problem many people had with this set.

No permanent fixes for this problem, I assume?

 

[Trekker4747]

^ Which M*A*S*H set are you meaning, BTW? Is it one of the season sets, or the complete series set?

It was the complete series "Martinis and Medicine" set the one that comes in a big green army-looking case.

The backing to the "pockets" the DVDs slid into inside the case was a very rough-feeling cardboard. It had scratched the DVDs up pretty good. They looked like someone rubbed them on Klinger's ass.

I did some reading on the set and it seems this is a problem many people had with this set.

No permanent fixes for this problem, I assume?

The DVDs come out of packaging scratched up. It's "possible" to transfer the undamaged ones to seperate cases and probably even possible to get the scratched ones repaired but that seems a lot to go through because of shitty package design.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

But they're not going to permanently revise the packaging so this doesn't happen again?

 

[Trekker4747]

But they're not going to permanently revise the packaging so this doesn't happen again?

I've not yet seen or heard anything about them revising or improving the packaging.

But it's a known problem. If you read reviews on the set or the comments section at Amazon you'll see that many have had this problem.

 

[StarshipDefiant]

But they're not going to permanently revise the packaging so this doesn't happen again?

I've not yet seen or heard anything about them revising or improving the packaging.

But it's a known problem. If you read reviews on the set or the comments section at Amazon you'll see that many have had this problem.

Which is why, despite first glance at how cool it looks, I hate extravagant packaging designs. They should have DVDs in standard cases, even if they still release a special box set like this (that has extra goodies in it and what not, I see something similar for The X-Files I wish I could get, the art cards and the like), the DVDs them selves should be in standard cases, simply because of things like this. I've had experiences of DVDs scratched because of poor cases. Bah.

 

[Pingfah]

Because I deal with this stuff all of the time. And my "acting like a dick" and "petulant toddler" are nothing more than severe semantics to decribe people who keep insisting and insisting I break the rules for them.

No, not really, when you used them against Dennis it was just you puffing your chest up, and taking out your relentless wounded negativity on whoever was at hand.

 

[Mr Light]

I've read the same problem exists with the new slimmer Six Feet Under box set. And I had that problem with the Deadwood box set. So basically, whenever you see a really slim set holding an entire multi-season television series... be very very suspicious. Because they're probably in cardboard sleeves that will scratch the disc as you pull them out!

 

[Trekker4747]

I have the X-Files box set and the DVDs for it come in cardboard booklets. But that cardboard is glossed and smooth, doesn't scratch the DVDs when it comes out. The MASH cardboard was rough. Shame, too, because it was a very nice-looking set and it's a series I really wanted on DVD.

No, not really, when you used them against Dennis it was just you puffing your chest up, and taking out your relentless wounded negativity on whoever was at hand.

Not at all. I don't "puff up my chest" because I've no need to here. It was just me using severe language for the sake of "drama" and simply because I think anyone who keeps insisting rules be bent for them -no matter how civil they're being- are acting like toddlers.

 

[Mr Light]

Well, I got the digital cable installed today (despite the snow storm!). While the HD channels look great, and I'm getting new channels (I can finally watch Doctor Who, Wolverine X-Men, and Spectacular Spider-Man!)... the regular channels still look fuzzy. Not as bad as before, but it's still not a sharp image... like the one I had on my old TV with my old analog cable. In retrospect I think I have just not bought the HD-TV in the first place but oh well we've installed new cable and bought a BR Player now. Also, Comedy Central says available in HD but it's not on my cable package, do only some providers carry this or something?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Comedy Central says available in HD but it's not on my cable package, do only some providers carry this or something?

There are some channels that aren't carried on all providers (in HD, at least). If yours doesn't have that one, they probably will soon.

 

[RAMA]

Well, I got the digital cable installed today (despite the snow storm!). While the HD channels look great, and I'm getting new channels (I can finally watch Doctor Who, Wolverine X-Men, and Spectacular Spider-Man!)... the regular channels still look fuzzy. Not as bad as before, but it's still not a sharp image... like the one I had on my old TV with my old analog cable. In retrospect I think I have just not bought the HD-TV in the first place but oh well we've installed new cable and bought a BR Player now. Also, Comedy Central says available in HD but it's not on my cable package, do only some providers carry this or something?

That's the cable company who keeps the regular 480i channels for the peons who don't have HD yet.

RAMA

 

[Aragorn]

Westley Strellis thinks HDTVs are a waste of money too:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss68YWoihqs[/yt]

Lilburn Police are investigating what may have caused a man to walk into a Walmart and destroy 29 flat-screen televisions.

Just after noon Wednesday, Westley Strellis, 23, of Lawrenceville, walked into the Walmart on Lawrenceville Highway in Lilburn.

After grabbing a metal baseball bat from the sporting goods section, he walked to the electronics department and destroyed the TVs on display.

The televisions are reported to be valued at over $22,000, police said.

Strellis is being held in the Gwinnett County Jail. He has been charged with 29 counts of criminal damage to property in the second degree, police said.


Is this you, Mr. Light?