What an Orwellian few days I have had dealing with Samsung. Let me bring you up to speed — I have a TV that’s less than two months old, and it has a dead pixel smack dab in the middle of the screen. Since it’s 60″, it’s pretty goddamn noticeable. Like a zit on the middle of the prom queen’s forehead.
In the past, I’ve had dead pixels. Single ones, like this. But I had an LG TV, and in the other cases, an Apple iPad. Now, Apple was the absolute best — they just took two iPads back with single dead pixels and gave me new ones. LG was the second best — they replaced the panel on the TV *twice* with one single dead pixel.
Samsung? Samsung Tech Support is a collection of assholes. I called them regarding my dead pixel on the phone, and after 2 hours, received the message that “your TV is operating within technical specifications”. In other words, “it’s broken, we admit that, but it’s not broken enough for us to fix it.”
I took to Twitter to vent my rage. Someone from @SamsungSupport got in touch with me. I gave them my ticket number, and proceeded to go through a 2-day process where they asked met to send them pictures, etc., describe the problem, and so on. It was a complete waste of time because they ended up with the same answer. “Your TV is operating within technical specifications.”
Really? I wonder if they’d put a TV with a dead pixel on a showroom floor. And if 1919 x 1079p is acceptable, they should put on the box, “1080p — or 1079p, or maybe 1060p, we’re not really sure!”
It’s as simple as this: LG and Apple are better companies than Samsung. They adhere to “the customer is always right” rule. Samsung is cheap. They don’t want to ship me a new panel because it costs them too much money — never mind that the current panel is broken.
So, you know what? I think 5-6 more pixels on my TV may “suddenly” go dead and we’ll see if Samsung will fix it then. If, of course, 4 of those pixels suddenly become magically unstuck, well, that’s not my problem.
Anyway, bottom line, I strongly urge you to avoid buying Samsung TVs. Their picture quality is inferior to LG’s as well. Get an LG, or a Sony, anything but a Samsung. Or if you burn out a pixel you’ll get caught in doublespeak from Samsung that would make George Orwell proud. I, personally, will never buy another Samsung product as long as I live, and am planning on returning this TV to Best Buy, even if it costs me my full contract, to get a TV from a company that actually gives a shit about their customers.
I repeat: NEVER BUY SAMSUNG.