We're Off to See the Vizio!
Anyone walking through a Costco or Sam's Club recently may have had their progress impeded by the razor-sharp images emanating from one of Vizio's new XVT flat-panel LCD's. Once sufficiently slowed, your eyes might have blinked twice, then rolled around in your head like a roulette wheel: that's right, the price of these HD stunners is easily 25% to half of what a similar set would cost you if it bore the Sony or Panasonic logo. Okay, now you can go buy that delicious, $4.99 Costco roast chicken, but what are you going to watch while you de-bone the badboy??
I don't know about you, but my inner cheapskate tells me that the difference in markup pays for the mammoth advertising and marketing budgets of the aforementioned Japanese Goliaths, while Irvine-based (Go USA!) Vizio claims a major share of sales merely by producing a superior product -- so the dough actually goes into r&d and customer service. Five million flat panel sets later, upstart Vizio has climbed to the top of the North American sales charts in just a couple of years on the market.
That having been said, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding in this case is Vizio's new XVT technology, which boasts a 120hz refresh rate (twice the speed of most other LCD's) and 1080p LCD clarity. To boot, the company's proprietary "Smooth Motion" technology ensures high-end picture performance from any video source.
Translated into human-speak, what that means to football and hockey fans is that there are no ghost images when the camera pans fast or a runner bursts down the sidelines at warp speed. Add four HDMI inputs to that and a side panel HD game port and you'll soon be slaying aliens so lifelike you'll be looking for green slime to be oozing out of the screen. Yes, it's a great value, but Vizio performance trumps its price-point by a mile.
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About this blog
A Detroit native, David Weiss fled Motown for Los Angeles in 1978 and began to write for Daily Variety and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, primarily as a music critic with a focus on jazz. His own music career started soon thereafter, with the surrealistic funk band Was (Not Was), then various gigs as a composer and producer, working with Bob Dylan and Rickie Lee Jones among others. In a parallel universe, Weiss has been filing golf and travel stories for T&L Golf, Golfweek and The New York Times and is a regular contributor to NPR's "Day to Day" program, doing stories on music and all things cultural.
David, I've written a whole lot about HDTV of late, and I also succumbed to the lure of the cheap Vizio at Costco.
I only spent $350 on a smaller TV, but for the big-money sets, the difference between companies like Vizio and the Sharps, Sanyos and Sonys is that if you should need service, Vizio really won't do much for you, whereas the major Japanese-based manufacturers will actually service the set in warranty and afterward at their geographically dispersed authorized service centers.
The same TV geeks say that manufacturers like Vizio have no plans to make parts available, so after the warranty period (during which you need to send or take the TV to them at your expense), there is really no way to fix one of these TVs. They're pretty much disposable.
For me, that's OK. Spending only $350, I'm not expecting any miracles. I can't remember the last time I had a TV repaired; they almost never break, and when they do, it's pretty much time to get another one.
But for these huge TVs costing $1,000 and more, the notion of disposability is a bit harder to swallow.
So if you're the type who either doesn't keep things very long or is OK taking a chance on a product in exchange for saving a lot of money, these off-brand TVs are a good deal.
But if you're putting major bucks into one and think it might break, having a major manufacturer and its service network at your disposal could be the difference between a working TV and an expensive brick.