The Awful Truth About Mitsubishi

By Mike McGann
Posted Monday, March 24, 2008

Imagine if Mercedes or BMW started building unreliable cars. Further, imagine if the either company then largely opted not to stand behind its product. I think you can imagine the uproar — and the change in coverage from the major car magazines.

Maybe, then, it’s surprising that the uproar over the such a process occurring with Mitsubishi Digital Electric of America (MDEA) isn’t bigger. Yes, on various Web forums the awful truth about the last couple of generations of Mits HDTVs have been strikingly evident — the sets fail, the company is loathe to do much about it — even for those who pony up for extended warranties — and a surprisingly large number of consumers are left having spent a lot of money on a premium product that doesn’t work.

So, you might ask: “why aren’t we seeing this in the magazines?” As an old magazine editor I can answer: Tech magazines don’t do bad news anymore. You may have noticed that virtually every product reviewed is now the best thing since sliced bread. Why? Ad dollars. While it started to become pronounced a few years back, electronics companies started pulling ads from any publication that ran reviews of product that were less than a perfect marketing message. So any number of once-proud titles have been reduced to little more than shills for the industry. Interestingly, both readership and ad revenue is down for these publications — so giving in may not have been the best strategic choice.

And while the Web has become an increasingly stronger source for news and reviews, none of the sites, except maybe C-Net, have gotten any mainstream traction. And that’s how something like the decline and fall of Mitsubishi Electric has gotten so little attention.

But the story is out there on the Web, posted piece by piece by individual consumers. In that spirit, here is another piece, written not just from the perspective of a long-time tech journalist and ISF-trained tech, but as someone who put their hard-earned cash out there and ended up feeling burned.

Doing what I do for a living, I’m often asked what brands of TV to buy. For those unable to afford Runco, which includes me, I often recommended Mitsubishi. For many years, the company built premium products that tended to outperform their peers in the mainstream TV world. Sure, other companies would quietly rip them behind the scenes for starting the whole “zero percent financing” thing that became so prevalent in the late 1990s, but no one killed Mits over build quality or design of product. And they were well-known for exceptional customer service.

So when it came time to buy a TV for my family room, I did it the old fashioned way: I got in my car and went to the local Tweeter, knowing which of a handful of large-screen models I was interested in owning. I ended up with a WD-62725, a DLP 720p set that I reckoned would do well enough with what I watched, mostly 720p and 480p. On delivery, the set had a couple of minor issues: one dead pixel in the upper left and a two or three degree tilt to the right in picture geometry. While both were annoying, neither was grounds for a warranty return I knew and I did my best to properly calibrate the set — and the result was pleasing. For the most part, I was pleased with the set’s performance. We found it had replaced the downstairs theater as our movie viewing spot of choice — sealed when we found ourselves projector-free six month after buying the Mitsubishi.

All was well until last fall when the set’s Bulb-left warning light came on. At less than 2,000-hours of total use, I was little surprised, as the bulbs were supposed to be rated at 4,000 hours, or more than two years of our typical TV use. I assumed that he combination of teenagers and grade schoolers populating my house had left the set on a great deal more than I thought, pushing our hour usage beyond what I thought it was (the lack of an hour counter, as found on most other units with replaceable bulbs made it impossible for me to verify it either way). We ordered a new bulb and waited for the old one to expire, which it did within a couple of months. As with so many others, the bulb failure was a hint of problems to come.

Within a month of replacing the bulb, the set failed entirely, the week before the Super Bowl. Despite the fact that the TV was 18-months old, it was still under warranty, as I opted for the extended warranty when I bought it. Unfortunately, it took five calls to Mitsubishi — and frankly, telling them point blank about my role in the tech media and that I was ready to climb the food chain at MDEA — to get any action.

Now once I had a service guy — a local company that contracts for most of the major brands — things went better. He was responsive, showed up when he said he would and I watched him wrestle with the innards of the set. He came to my house three times to figure out why the HDMI port was causing the set to lock up the system and crash it. Ultimately, he replaced the entire digital video signal path — a total of parts and repairs approaching the cost of the TV. Both he and I thought it was fixed until it failed last week — again. Same problem: dare to use HDMI, the TV crashes.

Obviously, I’ve been around gear long enough to know it has a failure rate. But the set’s failures appear to be design-related — as so many other failures have been documented around the Internet. Looking at the way the main chassis is designed — I’m startled at how poorly thought out it is — as compared to a PC, it is an overly complex and sloppy design. Sure, PCs and TVs have different design needs, but a lot of what each does is very similar now, and frankly, a TV can afford to be simpler — not more complicated than a high-end PC.

As an aside, I’d like to note that NetCommand is the single-worst user interface in the history of televisions. Whomever designed it wasn’t really thinking about how people use televisions — and like the chassis design, is overly complex without any meaningful benefit for the consumer.

And worst of all: I know I’m lucky. I’ve read account after account of people whose sets died just out of warranty, or even if they paid for an extended warranty, got the run around from MDEA. Mine will get fixed, one way or another — and I’ll be forced to either spring for another extended warranty, or ditch the set and buy something else. I'm aware of at least two class-action suits being prepared against the company. Disappointing for a $2,200 TV I expected to last a decade.

Maybe this explains the sudden success of Vizio and other inexpensive brands. As it turns out out, I bought a Vizio 42-inch LCD when the Mits failed and watched the Super Bowl on it — I had planned to replace my old gaming TV, a CRT Sony, with a Vizio flatscreen anyhow, and the sudden need for a TV moved up my timetable. At less than $1,000 with a year of in-home service (not to mention that it calibrates like a dream), I won’t lose sleep if the set goes belly up in three years, and odds are, based on the solid workmanship, it won’t.

In writing about home tech over the last 13 years, it’s amazing to see the sea change that the industry — an the industry media has undergone. It’s so much harder for people to find out the real story — to pick out the good product from bad now. As we relaunch TT (I've spent the last nine months with health issues, including major surgery), it is my hope that we can become a small part of that solution for consumers.