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30 Reasons I Don’t Buy Crap
By Jonathan | September 2, 2008 at 8:39 pm
Back a while ago when we were still in the apartment, our Toshiba DVD player bit the dust. It was on the fritz for at least a few months before that…sometimes the DVD tray would refuse to open/close, sometimes the DVD would skip tracks, all-in-all creating a really poor DVD viewing experience. When we moved into the house I dumped the thing into the garbage and opted to look to the future. Everyone knows that Blu-ray won the high definition video disc format war, so whether I wanted to purchase a new Blu-ray or HD-DVD player wasn’t the question. The real question here was this: “Do I want to spend $500 on a new Blu-ray player right now, or should I hold out for a little while and wait for the technology to mature a bit and the prices to drop?” The answer for me was #2: wait it out. (Dammit, I’m not buying a PS3!!!)
At this point I’m not ready to spend a smooth half grand on electronics, which is why #2 was the answer. The problem with this is that now we have no good way to watch DVDs. There’s a slight chance that Abi and I both brought portable DVD players into this marriage…but the real issue (finally stated) is that neither of those DVD players has a digital audio output for the 5.1 Bose surround sound system in the house. This means I am unable to get some sweet surround sound effects while watching movies with the sound cranked up rattling the walls, and that’s what I’m really looking for.
I held out for a while but was really inkling to watch something with a lot of explosions. After all, THIS IS MY HOUSE AND I CAN BE AS LOUD AS I WANT TO BE BECAUSE THIS IS MY HOUSE AND NO ONE CAN TELL ME TO BE QUIET!!! Last week I made the decision that I would find the DVD player with the cheapest retail price I could find just to hold us over until Blu-ray was a bit more reasonable.
Let me take a moment to explain a few things about my buying habits. When I buy things, especially electronics, my philosophy is to buy very high quality products. There are a few reasons behind this:
- I take good care of my things. When they break, it’s not my fault.
- I have found that nicer things last longer; therefore when I buy nice things I don’t need to replace them because they don’t break.
- This philosophy was pretty much followed out by my father (at least in terms of electronics), so it’s hereditary and I can’t help it.
Anyways, I decided that in my current situation that buying a cheap DVD player to keep me satisfied until it was replaced by a new Blu-ray was acceptable, even though it was against my core beliefs. I mean, come on! DVDs have been out since 1993…even a cheap DVD player should be decent, right? Abi and I stopped by Best Buy one day last week and found a $30 Insignia DVD player, decided it was acceptable, bought it and took it home. We plugged it in and watched a movie. Everything went surprisingly fine: good sound quality, good picture quality, remote worked…this thing was actually going to work out. Sweet, $30, not bad.
Saturday we were doing some work around the house when I decided to take a break and watch a scene from a movie with a great surround sound scene. The office building lobby scene from the Matrix came to mind, so I popped the DVD in. You know the one I’m talking about:
Anyways, I was fiddling around with things trying to skip directly to that chapter, but the remote wouldn’t work. No matter how hard I pressed on the buttons, the selected menu would only go up. Different buttons did the same thing. Hmmm…maybe I can program my Sony receiver remote to work with this Insignia DVD player. Good thought Lepolt, but Sony spits on that crap.
To conclude this long story, I took back the $30 POS and picked up a nice Sony $80 upconverting DVD player, which still works like a champ even after using it twice. So there you have it: 30 reasons I don’t buy crap.
Topics: complain, story, technology | 6 Comments »
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Why didn’t you just buy a PS3?
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:59 pm
i dont see where there are 30 reasons!
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Ugh. Sorry I have to spell out the 30 reasons. See…I don’t usually buy cheap stuff, however, we bought this DVD player for $30 and it broke within two uses, ie, 30 reasons I don’t by crap.
Kevin…I’m about to ban your IP
And a sidenote…as I was walking into the Best Buy store to return the crappy Insignia DVD player, a family was walking out of the Best Buy store with a new [crappy, no doubt] LCD HDTV. Sorry guys, hope your luck is better than mine (although I wouldn’t bet on it).
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 pm
Actually some of the LCD panels used in the “cheap” TVs sold at Best Buy are actually the same panels as used in last year’s name brand TVs. You can read more about this kind of stuff at http://www.avsforum.com/ I’m not certain the same can be said for the Insignia DVD player you purchased, but I’ll leave that research as an exercise for the reader.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Why don’t you buy a PS3 or build an entire home entertainment system (DVR, blue ray, and music so you can blare your Kenny G) you can find those for a grand but you get all of those things rather than JUST the blue ray player
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 am
I see, no props for suggesting the matrix seen. mm hmm.