Monday, March 24, 2008

Samsung Broke My Heart



I bought a Samsung SyncMaster 205BW flat screen monitor. It was well priced and I like everything about it. Good color, brightness, and a digital port.

But there's a bit of a design flaw in it. As you can tell (somewhat) from the bad photograph, the monitor is tilting forward more and more as time goes on. The connection hub that supports the screen does not swivel up and down. All the monitor's weight is pushing down on some small metal rails that appear to be made of of some soft metal like aluminum or an aluminum alloy.

This is the second monitor. I had to return the first one because these metal railings snapped leaving the monitor basically unusable.

Now I know better than to try to bend it back into an upright position. So I'm trying to think of a solution. This problem has been noticed by others and you can find many blog and forum postings.

From what I've read Samsung is not being helpful and wont admit that its a design flaw. Instead they choose to tell consumers that they abused the product. I also had a hard time returning the original monitor to Office Depot because they were hiding behind some warranty technicalities. And then they tried to up sell me which was sort of annoying. In the meantime I was dead in the water because this was my only monitor. (Don't get me started on the Toshiba notebook that died a horrible death.)

It seems to me a good idea for Samsung just to admit that this was just a really bad design. A couple of little pieces of soft metal obviously cannot hold a fairly heavy screen in an upright position. At the very least they could offer some kind of work around. (There is a viagra joke in here just dying to get out.)

Its too bad because I've bought a lot of Samsung products and have never had any problems. I even met one of the Samsung sales reps at Memory Express and he gave me a nice pen. He seemed like a nice man, but right about now I'd like to ball kick him even though I know its not his fault.

I apologize for my messy desk in the photo. Those M&Ms are not mine. Please recommend this post

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