Manufacturer questions I always wanted answered

Hi!

Sharp Electronics is a Japanese company. They probably build things wherever they can do so, as long as it is the cheapest place to do so. Their headquarters in Japan is probably more devoted to business related work, and not actual manufacturing. Drivers for their printers still appear to be developed in Japan.

The most likely answer is that the buying public wanted things cheaper. Things can only get so cheap (at least usually) before something gives. Zenith might have been teetering on the edge of failure at that point, and the RCA/GE brands had become part of Thomson Consumer Electronics around that time.

Dunno. Not sure how you'd find out.

No warranty? Now that I highly doubt.

As far as parts go, the way I've heard it is that manufacturers are under no obligation to provide parts to the public...only authorized repair centers. Any more, it is said that product lines and the technology used to produce them are passed up by something "newer" (not always better--maybe "cheaper") that providing parts and service over the long term doesn't make sense.

Many people don't care to repair something when it breaks anyway. They just toss it, give it away or whatever and then buy something new.

Couldn't tell you for sure...I don't know if LG was/is in the picture tube business. And the TVs may have really been built by Zenith to start with. If when they bought Zenith, control over the entire operation became theirs (as it surely did) someone may have decided that the picture tube manufacturing facilities were an asset.

Perhaps it's a business relationship between the two. Some of the things in a VCR are high precision parts that not anyone can make. It may be cheaper for JVC to buy the parts and assemblies from someone else than to make them in-house. In any case, few electronic devices have components that were made by the company who assembled them.

As far as I know, it was JVC that invented VHS. (The JVC company makes this claim.) Perhaps there was a marketing agreement between the two companies. Such things happen quite often when a new technology comes out...companies may form alliances with one another.

People in the US don't generally want to repair anything. Also, it's getting harder to find repair shops. There was a good one here that just disappeared one day. To this day I still don't know why. They managed to do quite a business. At one time the practice of providing service literature with a product was common, however. I have a Montgomery Ward branded 19 inch table TV (still working well) from the mid-80s that has a plastic compartment containing a complete packet of service literature. Printed all over this literature in red ink are notices stating that the documentation is the property of the customer and should be returned with the set when it is repaired.

William

Hi!

Now that is truly odd. I've found that HP has usually done a good job of providing updated drivers for many older products. In my case, they had updated the Mac OS X drivers to be "Universal" (Intel & PowerPC) software for a DeskJet 5800 series printer. On the PC side of things, I was impressed to note that XP/2000 drivers were available for my OfficeJet 500 series machine.

As far as I'm aware, the 64 bit editions of Windows XP have not been hugely popular, have a pile of limitations on what current software can run on them, and much hardware doesn't appear to be supported.

William

Michael A. Terrell spake thus:

IOW, so long as it passed the ISO 9001 bureaucracy tests, they were happy?

-- "In 1964 Barry Goldwater declared: 'Elect me president, and I will bomb the cities of Vietnam, defoliate the jungles, herd the population into concentration camps and turn the country into a wasteland.' But Lyndon Johnson said: 'No! No! No! Don't you dare do that. Let ME do it.'"

- Characterization (paraphrased) of the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race by Professor Irwin Corey, "The World's Foremost Authority."

You're definitely right about Panasonic being a Matsushita brand now that I come to think of it.

JVC invented VHS though.

Graham

Don't forget they had both Saisho and Matsui.

Graham

Really ?

Easily a decade ago I recall getting a DJ500C ? and it wouldn't install on WFWG it was 'unsupported' as a 'network printer'.

Graham

National and technics too.

Bob

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Why didn't they use National, a brand name they had already been using in the rest of the world, including Japan? Was it because the National boy looked too much like Bob's Big Boy?

Hi!

Yep. I don't think I've ever had a DeskJet 500C in my possession, but I do have a 500 and a 560C, both of which are still in active use. Both have been attached to Windows for Workgroups machines and they worked fine in a networked environment.

HP used to say that a lot of their printers were "not supported" as network printers...I know the 600 and 660 were on that list. It involved a lot of tinkering around, but I did get them working over a network. I wish I could remember just how I'd done it--one of those printers wore out and the other one, while still around, is hooked up to a much newer computer.

William

The Japanese mind?

There was already a well known US company named National Radio that made ham radio equipment and broadcast transmitters.

JVC was part of a small consortium that bought the rights to Ampex's cartridge video tape design when they decided not to enter the consumer video tape market. IIRC, they paid a measly $10,000 for everything.

It became part of the Matsushita group - they bought 50% - in the early '50s, so I'd guess it's simply a marketing thing.

Didn't know that. If you Google on helical scan the hits I looked at credit Ampex with inventing this in '56 - but of course the original 2" quadruplex pro machines weren't helical scan. They had the head at right angles to the tape and achieved head wrap with vacuum. Four heads were needed on the drum so one was always in contact with the tape - hence the name. This was impractical for domestic use as you need a clean supply of compressed air. Helical scan gets round this by having the head just off in line with the tape and records along, rather than across, the tape and only needs two heads on the drum. The tape itself can deform enough for good head contact so no vacuum needed.

Ampex pro helical scan - 1" C Format - machines didn't appear until the late '60s, although others had used it for semi-pro apps before.

So I do wonder who holds the patent on helical scan? More Googling is needed...

Probably because of:

Keyword= accountant.

I would think they have expired, long ago. Open R-R 1/2" mono and color machines were being sold by Panasonic, Shibaden and Sony by 1970 as "Industrial Video" for making training tapes and low grade commercials. My high school got a Panasonic for the '69-'70 school year, and only two tapes and a camera. It was to be used to time shift the EDTV on PBS to when a teacher needed it. I had teachers demanding that very show related to their class be recorded and archived on tape that was $110 an hour.

The US Army was in the process of phasing out all of its 2" Ampex machines to U-matic at Ft Rucker Alabama when I was stationed there in '72-'73. Ever see a U-matic with a Tektronix nameplate? the military wasn't allowed to purchase foreign made electronics, unless it was supported by a well known US company, so the Sony machines were sold through Tektronix.

BTW, two 2" machines and the associated equipment was in a full length tractor trailer for remote shoots. Less than 20 years later I had more capability in the back of the mobile production unit I built in a standard length van for WACX in Orlando.

Is that a control-panel-less printer? If not, more or less all printers will run on a whole host of other-model drivers. If a driver isnt availble I just pick something else with the same type of print, ie same resolution and same print technology (inkjet/dm/daisy/laser etc) and same manufacturer. The differences tend to lie in very minor points that arent a problem in practice.

NT

I did. Once. It was a 13" Goldstar purchased around 1984 or so. Of course the thing lasted till the CRT finaly faded out (14 years!)

Too downmarket I think.

Graham