What is it with electronics these days

So our DVD player died today. This is our 2nd DVD player that died in the past 4 years and each seemed to only last about 2 years. What is it with these things. It's not like these are noname brands where that would be expected...I'm talking about DVD players from Sony and Panasonic.

Our first DVD player which we bought 6 months or so before we got married was a sony DVD player which I really liked. It wasn't a cheap one either, but after about 2 years it started skipping while playing dvds or sometimes not recognizing them all together. Sometimes it displayed a C1300 error message which is caused by a bad pickup assembly. Turns out this was a common problem on Sony DVD Players from that time period. Some were threatening Sony with a class action suit over the faulty parts, but I never heard anything more about it.

Since the Sony died, I bought a Panosonic next. But just today, it died with the dreaded H07 error which means the motor is dead. This link shows that this is a common error with Panasonic DVD players in general. It won't play any movies at all right now. They all seem to die with this error after 13-24 months. One person even posted that he was lucky his lasted for 33 months. Several people even mentioned how their kids noname $50 player outlasted their nice panosonic one. It seems the group was removed, but one person started an H07 Hunters MSN group to see how many people were affected by the junk panasonic players.

We really should start a class action suit against Sony and Panasonic for the junk that they are producing. 2 DVD players in 4 years is outrageous, and when you combine that with the horrible Panasonic cordless phones and Best Buy experience I previously blogged about, you can see that these companies built up a good reputation so they could pawn off filth on us now.

So now I'm in the market for another DVD player. I can't even wait till the new HD-DVDs come out. Any suggestions ... and don't say another Panasonic. Seriously what would be a good DVD player now?