Defunct Plasma

Being an avid purchaser and user of electronic type products, I feel it’s my responsibility to share any thoughts and/or experiences that I might have with regard to such purchases, especially when the stinkin’ $1400 purchase decides to STOP WORKING ABRUPTLY after only 2 years of use. That’s right. I’m here to tell you all about the big fat 42” junker sitting there all defunct in our recreation room, leaving the Catholic Family without big screen entertainment, not so perfect timing for the upcoming Super Bowl Sunday. And I’m so ready to out a certain company that shouldn’t have sold said big-fat-42”-junker to us to begin with, so sit back and enjoy.

*Push, push, puuuuuush* “It won’t turn on. What’s the deal?” Catholic Hubs complained as we waited patiently while watching the power light blink from green to red-red-red-red-red-red-red, red-red-red. The sequence repeats, then *click* nothing. Now imagine an electrical engineer and technology professional in the same room getting all busy troubleshooting the Philips 42” Pixel Plus 3 HD Plasma F television, the same one that still seemed new to us after buying it only 2 years and 3 months ago. Yet could we get it to power on? Nope, nada. So we finished watching our Netflix movie by way of laptop and vowed to investigate further in the morning. We know our limits.

Unfortunately, the down 42” junker affected everyone at the Catholic Homestead the next day – no Wii Fit body test and yoga for incognito, no Wii Madden 2009 football or ESPN watching for Catholic Son, no Wii Music for Catholic Girlie, and no Netflix movie for the Catholic Parents. So Hubs collected the product registration along with the make/model information, then went online to see what he could do to remedy the issue. Interestingly enough, Google knows all about this problem and delivered to us many pages of search results containing exactly the same blinking light, television-gone-bad type scenario. Not only that, but Google also informed us of an earlier RECALLED Philips model with similar issues. Coincidence? Now what do we do?

As Hubs and I think back to when we declined the service agreement extension, we’re all, Crap. Not that we usually depend on service agreements, mostly because we’re pretty much our own in-house Customer Support when it comes to electronics, and we tend to replace our stuff when it becomes obsolete anyway. But this is one time that having a 3 year contract would’ve worked out in our favor. Crap again. Oh, and we should’ve done the requisite Google search before dropping $1400 on a plasma, but I just don’t even want to go there right now, because in my heart I still want to believe that Philips would’ve corrected that little issue before releasing the model 42pf9631d/37 we brought home with us, thus no search results to that end. Dreamer? Well, yeah probably.

So what’s the plan? Plan A: We’ve contacted Philips via www.philips.com by posting a customer support ticket, acting completely oblivious to any previous plasma recalls. Meanwhile, we standby waiting to see if the technicians have anything to say beyond, “Your service agreement has expired. Good luck and have a nice day.” Then Plan B is to hold onto our blinking big-fat-42”-junker for when Philips recalls it like they should’ve done by now anyway. And finally, Plan C involves looking for another big screen TV, one that is NOT made by Philips and comes up clean on every single Google search imaginable.

Wish us luck – and treasure your big screen TV this Super Bowl Sunday. Toshiba sounds mighty nice right about now.