I’ll be off to Sears shortly to take a nice $999 34" Philips widescreen HDTV. Stunning picture. This is a regular flat-screen TV, not a projection or plasma or LCD. Should I get the extended warranty on it, or is it a relatively safe product to forego the warranty on?
As a rule, the price of these extended warranties goes straight in the salesman’s pocket. If you feel you must, tell him you’ll pay $25 for a 3 year warranty or he can forget it. I negotiated down to something like $50 for a 3 year warranty on my big screen t.v. and haven’t had anything go wrong with it in 2 yrs 8 months. I think the LCDs are pretty stable.
For peace of mind I’d get the warranty.
I wouldn’t buy the extended warranty unless it’s really cheap. In my experience, with electronics it’s either going to crap out right away, in which case you return it, or it’s going to crap out after three years, so I wouldn’t find the warranties worth it even if they weren’t completely overpriced.
Plus, the few people I’ve known who actually used their extended warranty at a retail electronics stores were all fairly unhappy with the process. The stores usually fought having to fix or replace it in the first place, and then after they agreed to do it, it took forever to get shipped off for repair and shipped back. (None of these were at Sears, though.) Bah! I’ll just take my chances.
Ah hell, you’re right. In my experience they’re apt to blame malfunctions on user error anyway. Consumer Reports says taht Philips is the 2nd most unreliable model, so I’ll pay a bit more for a Toshiba, JVC, or Sony.
On a $1000 purchase I would consider it. How much is the 3 year warranty? I wouldn’t pay over $125 for the warranty.
The Price on these units will be a lot less in 3 years.
This is still a relatively new Tech and a high price tag. You could have unexpected problems with the Tuner and other electronics. I would expect the tube itself to be reliable.
Sears has replaced for me: a VCR that was 2 years and 6 months old because it ate a tape. (They could have said I put a bad tape in and it wasn’t their fault)
Later they repaired our $290 Vacuum with a $28, 3 year warranty. It was 2 years old and when the belt broke the unit kept running and actually melted part of the housing. They could have copped out and blamed us again, but they made the repair.
The only bad thing with Sears is my wife told me K-Mart just bought them out, if this is true then my past experience with them is probably void now.
Warranty is $199. More excellent arguments have been brought up against it… electronics usually break down during the return period, or they tend to break down after the warranty expires… and I didn’t even stop to consider that this same TV will probably be worth far less a couple of years down the road (especially considering it’s a dying CRT model).
I wouldn’t pay 20% of the full value. That is robbery. Should be closer to 10%.
Good Luck
True. That’s probably how they survive; they were one of the only places I visited where many of their TVs are extremely competitively priced compared to online vendors.
Actually, I was in the midst of purchasing the TV (with the warranty) when the CC was declined. (Turns out the fraud department had placed a hold on it due to the high purchase amount.) Yet another reason why the $15 subscription is a great investment.
$200 is ridiculous. Definitely not worth it.
I recommend against a Sony. I got a Trinitron monitor about oen or two years after they came out, and it crapped out on me just outside of the one year warranty. Just my $0.02.
I figured I was going to be spending a lot more time working at home, and watching TV from treadmill, than logging actual hours vegging in front of the theater, so I wound up buying a very nice Toshiba HDTV monitor.
If you remember, in about a month, let us know how you like it.
Will do. It was an amazingly good deal for Best Buy. Same model as http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=90145050&loc=111&sp=1, only $400 cheaper at Best Buy.
I’ll be getting a warranty replacement plan when I pick it up tonight, simply because I’m a lot more uneasy with LCDs than with CRTs for some reason, and also because the only “good” warranty story I’ve heard was from Best Buy.
The story involves my mom. She got an extended warranty on a digital camera several years ago, that cost $3000 then… :eek: I believe it was the first digital camera that used a CD-RW, a Sony Mavica or something. A month or so before her 3-year warranty period was up, it broke down and she went to Best Buy and tried to get a replacement.
They replaced it, alright… they gave her store credit for the full $3000 purchase price to spend on any one camera that she wished!