[lcaillo]

All of the manufacturers other than Mitsubishi have given up on rear projection completely in favor of flat panels. They are simply following the trend in purchasing.

As for an extended warranty, that is your choice, depending on whether you feel you need the insurance or not. Generally, they are not a good value. With a Samsung, they may be. Samsung did have lots of problems with their DLP products, largely due to decisions to build them to sell cheap relative to competitors. If you have one of the LED based sets, these seem to have been more reliable than the lamp based sets, but they also have not been in the field as long yet.

The other point about extended warranties is that you may find it harder and harder to get good service in the future. There has been a trend among the warranty companies and TPAs toward reducing labor rates, increasing the paperwork, using cumbersome parts systems, and generally making life harder for servicers. Many servicers are beginning to drop some of the big warranty companies because they are making it too difficult to do business. The result is the use of larger service contractors that may or may not have a presense in your area. I suggest that any warranty you buy should be researched carefully to find out who in your area provides the service. I just might be some yahoo working out of his garage that can't do much more than swap computer boards.

 

[lcaillo]

The mitsubishi sales guys that I know seem to be quite happy with their place in the market these days.

 

[lcaillo]

Some have reported problems with the LEDs but I have not seen nor heard much about it in the service lists and forums. The parts are not that expensive if you do have a problem in that area anyway.

 

[lcaillo]

The main reason that DLP sets are not sold by most vendors is that the trend in marketing has been toward flat panels. The RPTV market was shrinking and the various vendors decided that it was easier to just sell LCDs and a few still sell PDPs. Additionally, most of the DLP makers never really took the products seriously, building them as cheap as possible to stay ahead of the dropping panel prices, and ended up with products that were rather unreliable. Samsung and RCA had so many problems with most of their sets with color wheel, lamp, light tunnel, and ballast failures that it gave the category a black eye in the mind of many consumers.

Currently, only Mitsubishi markets RPTV, and it is perceived to be a niche market. For the money, however, they have some pretty good value products when you consider size and image quality. Other than the pervasive capacitor problems in the first generation of their DLP sets, the Mitsubishi DLPs have been very reliable compared to the other brands with the common color wheel problems of others being virutally non-existent in their sets. They also currently sell their lamps for $99 retail, making that cost issue mostly insignificant.

Many vendors still use DLP in projectors, as it is a very effective and elegant solution to the problem of getting an image to a screen.

 

[lcaillo]

I don't understand what you mean by "keep up the pace with te LCD/Plasma." The trend toward marketing flat panels and the consumer demand for them was never a matter of keeping pace. Most of the makers simply shifted to products that had higher market appeal, leaving Mitsubishi the lone player in the RPTV niche.

I am also not sure what "never really took off" means. The DLP RPTV sets were sold by a number of vendors for about 5 years and hundreds of thousands of some models were sold. They had about a 20% market share for several years. DLP is still a viable technology that is used in the majority of projectors and is the technology of choice for the Digital Cinema industry. Seems like it took off pretty well to me.