Don't buy Maxent or Sampo Televisions!

... and other observations on flat panel TVs.

So my girlfriend won a Maxent plasma TV at the opening of Dunn Brother's Dallas (a cool alternative to Starbucks.) They bought it from Costco. It has a great picture, excellent reception, very good menu system and remote responsiveness. But after 7 months it quit turning on. Not that disappointing, it happens. But what happened next shows what a crappy company Maxent is.

I went to their website and filled out the form for support. I got a form email reply that all contact must be through telephone. Their telephone customer service always gives voicemail that all agents are busy and call back some other time, then hangs up without allowing you to leave a message. I hate companies that do that. I want to leave an email or voicemail and you get back to me when you are available. It is unacceptable to waste my time trying to get ahold of a company rep.

I got a back door phone number from Costco customer service (888-373-4368x108) that is answered by a human. Maxent refused to consider warranty without proof of purchase. I was worried about that but thought they might consider it as a courtesy and for good word of mouth advertising. I finally managed to get the receipt from the nice Dunn's Brother's manager.

It took Maxent 2 weeks to from the time I emailed them, to "validate the receipt" and send the replacement part to the local warranty tech. The part didn't work, and even he wasn't able to get through to Maxent tech support for help either. I gave him the back door phone number. That rep said there was nothing else they could do and have the customer call them.

So of course I called the same guy right back. He didn't even acknowledge that he had just been discussing my TV, and that I might have been right there where I could have spoke with him at the same time. He said I have 2 options, the first was give them a deposit for immediate shipping of a replacement TV, and the deposit will be returned when they receive our TV. Oh hell that wasn't going to happen. I wasn't going to risk inadvertently buying their crap products and customer service. Or I could send our TV, and they would send the new one when the broken one is received. I was ok with that. It's not like the TV hadn't been out of commission for a month already.

They said they will not cover our shipping expense. So we had to spend $140 to ship their junk under warranty back to them. I debated whether it was worth it or if we should cut our losses and trash it. After reading the warranty I discovered they could have got us for twice that because after 90 days they don't have to cover any shipping. They do it just so they don't have to keep sending parts and paying a warranty tech till the tech figures out Maxent's problems.

Even finding a company to ship the TV back to them is an issue. They refused to give any advice on who to use. FedEx won't cover damage on plasma TVs over $250 and DHL won't cover over $500. There was no additional insurance option. Only UPS covered the full declared value only if they determine the product was packed appropriately. Maxent only said they prefer the TVs returned in original packaging, but the UPS rep said original packaging doesn't always satisfy "appropriate" packing requirements for insurance consideration. What a cluster screw! In the end it took them just short of another month from the time we shipped our TV to them until they got a replacement back to us.

As we were going through this, the Costco rep mentioned it was the worst warranty she had ever read. She mentioned Vizio TVs have an excellent warranty. My Olevia TV has been very reliable with an excellent picture, and it was very cheap.

The issues I have with the Olevia are the digital TV reception isn't great (pixelates and drops when other TVs don't), it sometimes shows the CC data at the top of digital picture and when you hide it with vertical adjustment it throws the analog picture off by 10 times as much, the remote is very unresponsive with variable delay, and combined with a poor menu system it is easy to screw things up like accidentally deleting all your skipped or favorite channels.