Once great brands ...... now junk.

tooManyChoices wrote: »

You might enjoy this guy.

He take products and reviews/annihilates them. Also...

Watched the first two minutes and hated this guy way more than I could hate Dyson, talk about dragging it out ta fuk!

Hornby

Reading through this thread is a real walk down memory lane. I used to work in the brown goods (as consumer electronics were called back then) trade back in the day, so here goes...

Already at that stage the big manufacturers had closed down the factories in Europe and were producing in the Far East, but at least the products were designed by the original companies. Nowadays they all seem to have sold off the brand names to whoever had the cash to buy them.

Blaupunkt used to be a fancy TV brand and then became huge in car audio. I think that car manufacturers switched to in-built car stereos in order to stop rampant car stereo theft and I'd say this really hit Blaupunkt hard. I hadn't seen the name in years and then recently saw a Blaupunkt TV on sale in Tesco, so someone must have bought the rights to the name from Bosch.

In the early 1990s, Mitsubishi was the biggest selling TV brand in Ireland. I could be wrong, but if I remember correctly The term 'Black Diamond' was originally the name of their Black Matrix tube technology. These tubes were somewhat flatter than the normal tubes of the time. Toshiba's Flatter, Squarer Tube (FST) TV ads was for pretty much the same thing. At some stage they must have abandoned the Mitsubishi brand entirely for Black Diamond. Can't remember.

At that time Nokia were better known for their TV sets. I think they had two brands; Nokia and Salora.

Nordmende, Telefunken and another brand called Saba were all old German companies that were bought by Thomson. In their heyday, Nordmende had some pretty cool TVs, like this one, and the ones sold in Ireland were assembled by a company called Reynolds of Dundalk. Now, I can't remember if they were fully assembled or just "produced". Produced was the term given to converting TVs to the PAL-I standard that was used in Ireland.

Thomson also owned Ferguson, and their stuff was internally identical to the other three brands, but in Ireland at the time the brand was distributed by Electrolux.

Thomson also sold the world's first production widescreen TV. I think it was a 32" and it weighed a tonne. On the day of its launch Thomson bought a block of TV advertising across all French TV stations and transmitted the ad for it simultaneously across them all. I seem to remember that it was more common to refer to widescreen as "16 by 9" at that time.

JVC also sold off their consumer electronics business and I actually recently bought a 32" JVC TV for the bedroom in Currys. It's grand, but you can tell it's a budget machine alright. Way back when, we had a JVC HR-7700 VCR. It was from 1983 and came with a video of the highlights of the 1982 World Cup in Spain. I can tell you that that tape was watched until it was nearly threadbare! Originally, many other VCR brands were rebadged JVCs at the Victor Company of Japan owned the rights to the VHS format.

I myself really liked the Aiwa brand and had a couple of things from them; a few Walkmans, an alarm clock radio (which I still have) and an NSX-330 mini hifi. I remember the 3-CD changer with the flashing lights that somebody else mentioned, too.

I liked Philips stuff, too. They had some really stylish looking pieces of kit and to this day I have two fine hifi systems from them.

Nowadays, I usually buy either LG or Samsung. My main TV, microwave, fridge and washing machine and from these two and they are all excellent products. When it comes to vacuum cleaners I would highly recommend Miele. After going through countless useless vacuums I splashed out and bought a Miele and it was like nothing else. Another great brand is Bosch Professional (the blue stuff).