New 19in TV, help me pick

letsbehonest

I have just bought a Toshiba 19" HD tv from amazon £149.99 delivered.
quite impressive ,,, good sound quality

James123_2

LG LG LG! Don't even stop to consider the Alba at this price level. I have the LG in question - good, solid bit of kit. However, consider the comments over tinny sound. If you want to go for broke & get round the sound problems, then the Panasonic 26" televisions do the business and can by bought via Tesco Outlet on Ebay for £249. BUT ... you're obviously paying for this!
I don't think you'll get anyone on here claiming that an Alba is better than an LG. At least, not anyone of sound mind and body! It's a good deal from RS!!

PhylPho

spaceman5 wrote: »

wharefdale have always made speakers though have they not, i`m sure when i was a kid they where the speaker to have, maybe they branched out into the world of televisions and it did not work out, so maybe as when previous poster says that argos took over the wharfedale name, it was only the tv division, and the original wharfedale went back to what they where best known for i,e speakers, i dont know, just hazarding a guess

My fault for sending this thread off on a diversion, but just to clarify (and apologies for the length of this post beforehand) . . .

The first set of hi-fi speakers I ever bought were Wharfedales in far-off 1972. This was an era when British speaker manufacturing was thriving, great products, great brands.

But Wharfedale went the way of most such British companies, a succession of money troubles that eventually led to its name, but not its manufacturing plant, being bought by International Audio Group.

Wharfedale was not alone in going belly-up. Various British manufacturers crashed and burned. Once to be seen at all those wonderful 1970s and 1980s HiFi Shows held seemingly everywhere throughout the UK, they withered in the face of a staggering decline in consumer interest as audio geeks stopped obsessing about frequency responses and turned into computer geeks obsessing about Intel x286 architecture.

IAG snapped up brands wherever and whenever it could, including the once mighty (and wonderful) Mission. I think Quad finished up in IAG's hands as well. I know Castle Acoustics certainly did. Rogers, whose reference speakers were once a pride and joy of mine and damn near the 'gold standard' when it came to British speaker manufacturing, is today owned by, er, the Wo Kee Hong Group. China. Which under that brand name has produced. . . vacuum cleaners. Though not in authentic stereophonic sound.

Goodmans has had an eccentric ride. An excellent Middlesex-based speaker manufacturer, it was yet another to get into financial difficulties and wound up merging with the giant Tannoy. But Tannoy didn't seem to know what to do with the brand and so the Goodmans name vanished from sight.

Today, the name "Goodmans" refers to an importing / distribution company that sticks the Goodmans 'brand' name on just about every conceivable kind of product. . . that Goodmans never actually made.

Punters really do need to be careful about what they're buying -- if they're basing their purchase decision on what they think is somehow the latest product from a long-lived, and therefore successful, manufacturer.

Brands -- not the companies, not the businesses -- are bought and traded because it's cheaper (far cheaper) to knock up a product in China, Korea or even Romania and import it into the UK with a grafted-on brand name than ever it is to attempt to maintain, as a going concern, the company to which that brand name actually related.

One of the first to hurtle down this path was the much-loved Bush, which in the 1950s and 1960s seemed to have gotten one of its TVs into every household in the UK. The Bush "name" continues on. Buyers generally seem wholly unaware that the Bush company vanished a quarter of a century ago: 'Bush' is just a four letter word stuck on some bargain-basement electronic components put together on a Chinese assembly line.

I'm not sure if the illustrious Pye brand is still being foisted onto the unsuspecting, but that fabulous Cambridge-based company went bust back in the 1970s. It was bought by and absorbed into Dutch electronics giant Philips; I'm not sure what happened afterwards but Philips either dumped it or sold it on.

To go back to the OP though, and Argos's sale of products under the names of dead manufacturers, the practice probably dates back to the fate of one of the most famous brand names, and biggest employers of their kind, of 'em all: Murphy, whose televisions really were state-of-the-art (we're talking before World War II here, so pioneering was this British outfit) and whose radios were a byword for calibre of build and longevity of operation. Simply put: you wanted quality, you wanted Murphy.

Though not, astonishingly enough, 50 years ago. Because it's almost that long since Murphy died. In deep financial trouble, it was acquired by Rank Xerox (UK) which itself then got into deep financial trouble. A huge Government hand-out made no difference. Taxpayers' cash vanished and so too, eventually, did Rank / Murphy.

Around 30 years ago -- yes, that long -- Murphy was purchased by Great Universal Stores. GUS didn't -- couldn't -- afford to retain the original plant and the original, and highly skilled, work force. Instead, it contracted some electronics work out to a handful of small UK suppliers and assigned the bulk of it to Far East (i.e., cheap) manufacture. And so Murphy came to grace the pages of mail order catalogs. . .

There's an entire galaxy of brands out there which exist in collective folk memory. . . but not in reality.

If you're looking for Mr Russell or Mr Hobbs, good luck. They were real people. With a real company. But Russell Hobbs ultimately finished up in the hands of a certain Asil Nadir (and that really does have to be a fate worse than death) and then finally the US giant, Salton. Salton shifted production of Russell Hobbs to China long since.

Alba? It was established way back in 1917 by British entrepreneur Alfred Balcombe. So it's been going that long, huh? Er, no. ALBA went bust in 1982. It doesn't exist. It's a brand name owned by the same people who own the Goodmans brand name. And the Bush brand name, too.

Acoustic Solutions? Dead brand.

Grundig? Slightly more complicated here, because there's an identity issue: at least a part of Grundig's high-end (very high-end) audio division was saved from the wreckage of the company, and quality products from that division, but only that division, are still available. But only in Germany. Not here. The "Grundig" seen here is just a badge. It's not an indicator that what you're buying draws upon the pedigree and expertise of what was once one of the biggest names in the business.

There are innumerable other examples. But the problem's the same with all of 'em: far, far too many consumers think they're comparing like-with-like when buying a product nowadays. They ask if Bush is better than Alba and if Alba is better than Panasonic. Oh, c'mon. Get real. Because Bush and Alba certainly ain't.

Yet there's also a potential problem in being too dismissive. Wharfedale, for example, now in the hands of IAG, is actually being nurtured and nourished. Or: I think it still is. Certainly, a couple of years back I auditioned some Wharfedales speakers which IAG had commissioned to be developed in the UK, and then built in the Far East. And those speakers really were very good.

Nor is there anything fundamentally wrong with Far East / China production. Some of the world's biggest tehchno corporations have plants there. But, but. . . what those big names have -- Sony and Panasonic, for instance -- is a level of Quality Control, and component integrity, that the "fictional" brands (a) can't afford. . . so (b) don't have.

There's every reason to protect the Sony brand, the Panasonic brand, the Samsung, Sharp, Pioneer brand.

But there's no reason at all to protect a brand that doesn't actually relate to anything: if consumers find too much of the product output of one dead brand is crap, and stop buying it, then it's an easy job to produce exactly the same crap. . . only this time, with a different dead brand name plastered all over it.

Why not? Punters are gullible. Always have been. Always will.

:sad:

[Deleted User]

So to sum up PhylPho I should buy the Alba... :rotfl:

PhylPho

Deleted_User wrote: »

So to sum up PhylPho I should buy the Alba... :rotfl:

Nah. I'd definitely recommend a Bush. . .

:j

GT60

Have you tryed Tesco's or asda's own brand both 19" with dvd built in and both very good and both under £130.
We have both brands and you can see the picture from all angles and perfect for the caravan and ps video thingy.

PhylPho

GT60 wrote: »

Have you tryed Tesco's or asda's own brand both 19" with dvd built in and both very good and both under £130.
We have both brands and you can see the picture from all angles and perfect for the caravan and ps video thingy.

A very good point.

Though many sneer, Tesco is actually at pains to 'protect' the integrity of its Teknika (?) brand seeing as how failure of the product tends to reflect badly on the provider.

The supermarkets also have a reputation (unlike electronics retailers in general) of being pretty good about returns / refunds / replacements: after all, the hit on their £billions turn-over businesses is barely noticeable, though as time is money, they're not inclined to waste it in haggling.

We've also had experience of RRR with Argos. And it was exceptionally good.