Are unbranded cheap TVs are a false economy?
Before you buy a Television or other consumer electronics item you ought to consider not only the purchase price of the product but also the probability of it going faulty, the life expectancy of the product, and the features and the performance.
Main brand televisions from manufacturers such as Philips, Pioneer, Panasonic, Hitachi, LG, Samsung, JVC, Hitachi and Sharp always retail for more than inferior brands of TVs with unfamiliar brand badges on them. The unbranded cheap TVs from unknown manufacturers seem to be good value for money when compared to the known brands of televisions. The styling and features may make justifying the difference difficult.
How do the main brands of televisions justify the premium?
The known brands of televisions are more expensive for the reason that the UK subsiduary of the manufacturers invest in advertising the brand name which the unfamiliar cheap TV brands dont do. However are there any further reasons for the price difference?
Often the cheaper LCD televisions and the cheaper Plasma televisions are imported into the United Kingdom from factories in China and Eastern Europe and are distributed by unknown importers that dont have the infrastructure in the UK that the main TV brands have. This may well seem like a good thing because it keeps the costs down.
The manufacturers of Cheap televisions dont need to invest in their brand reliability, as known brands do. This is for the reason that you dont know which factory manufactured the Television so you wont be able to avoid it in the future if you buy another unbranded Television. So they dont have the same incentive to protect their brand from poor performing unreliable products.
Moreover the quality control isnt as stringent which again means that the possibility of the cheaper TVs going faulty is increased. As a result the out of box failure rate when new will be higher on cheap televisions than for branded TVs. Cheaper televisions will be more likely to fail within the first year, and beyond, than the more expensive branded Television models.
Main brand manufacturers of televisions create better designed internal circuits with higher quality components to improve the reliability of the TV. Cheaper televisions from unknown brands dont need to do this. Surveys that have been done by the magazine Which have establish that this is the case and main brands of televisions like Sony and Panasonic repeatedly out perform the cheap televisions from unheard of brands.
It is more difficult to repair cheap televisions from unknown brands
It is also more difficult get hold of parts for lesser brand cheap televisions. This is because the unbranded TVs manufacturers dont store the parts in the UK unlike the major TV brand manufacturers.
If an repair engineer is struggling to find the source of a fault on a main brand Television they can get technical assistance from the technical department of the UK subsiduary. In some cases if the repair engineer can’t fix the fault then the TV manufacturer will even carry out the repair. The unheard of cheaper TV brands dont have this kind of back up. As a result not only is it more probable that the unbranded cheap Television will go faulty but when it does it will be more difficult, if not impossible to obtain technical assistance. Furthermore it will probably take longer to acquire the parts. If the problem cant be resolved, due to no technical support, it follows that the unbranded cheap Television is more likely to become unrepairable earlier than the major brand televisions and will need replacing earlier.
I have seen instances on branded televisions where the product has failed 2 years after being purchased, and even though it came with a 1 year guarantee, the manufacturer has replaced the product or subsidised the cost of the repair to look after their brand image. This doesnt take place on cheap unfamiliar brands of TVs. On the unknown brand cheaper Television when the warranty has expired if it cant be repaired then it will mean additional expense replacing it.
Main brand televisions have superior picture and sound quality.
An additional reason for the higher selling prices for major brand TVs is that the manufacturers invest in research and development to find ways of improving the existing technology to enhance the performance of the Television. This doesnt happen with cheap unbranded TVs which have inferior features and performance. If you read specialist magazines like What Video or What Hifi you will see that main brand TVs get much better reviews than the unknown cheap Television brands.
Conclusion
Cheaper brands of TVs suffer poorer reliability and dont have the features and performance of the more costly main brand TV manufacturers. Bearing in mind that you often purchase a TV to last for 5 years or more, when you share the cost differential by the number of years that you plan to keep the TV for, it is worth paying the extra amount for a branded TV. More often than not the cheaper unbranded Television will prove to be more costly due to poor reliability and the probability that it will have to be replaced earlier. This is forgetting about the better performance of the main brand televisions. Therefore the unbranded cheap TVs stand for poor value compared to televisions from Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, LG, JVC etc.
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