VIZIO ~ CRAP. WORDS THAT DON'T RHYME ... BUT ARE SYNONYMOUS

VIZIO, VIZIO, CRAP, CRAP, … THEY RHYME!
I’ve never encountered a sh!t!ier TV in my life.

Over the years I’ve owned Zenith, RCA, GE, Sony, Samsung, LG, TCL, and a host of other brand TVs including Vizio. Wow, Vizio! What was I thinking? These are sold off the shelf at Walmart which should tell you something right there. They sit alongside similarly illustrious names such as ONN and other Chinese-made TVs.

I’ve owned a couple of Vizio TVs and God help me for buying a 2nd one when my 1st was already showing itself to be a wall-mounted piece of spastic plastic. It has hung on my wall for about 2-3 years.

Vizio isn’t really inexpensive as much as it is cheap. You see, the word “inexpensive” means that something costs less than what one would expect. It doesn’t necessarily indicate any drop in quality, but merely a lower price or fewer features.

The word “cheap” means that something is of sub par quality, problem prone, or simply trash. A TV that is inexpensive might well be a good one such as a Sony or Samsung when either on sale or one of their basic models. But a TV that is cheap might well be a piece of crap with a reputation for failure such as Vizio.

My experience with Vizio has seen a confusing and inexcusable litany of problems. I worked with Dale Hartlensen, a software guru associated with a leading software troubleshooting company. He took my TV into his lab and worked with it for 2 days.

What he said was not a surprise. “The firmware is inadequate, as well as it’s huge files of software which govern not only what channel you watch but the television’s ability to grab a signal or isolate one from another. The software and firmware I surveyed are not the work of a competent or even ‘good’ professional, just someone being paid to put this horrible excuse for code and software into this and almost certainly other televisions.”

What this means is that Vizio, already infamous for a myriad of performance problems such as gliches. mid-program software updates, uncontrollable volume and more problems making Vizio less than your best choice for a TV.

I have been in the middle of a TV show or movie when, out of the blue, Vizio has decided it’s time to do a software or firmware update. So much for watching my show or movie, at least until they are done updating and then restarting my TV.

I also have Samsung and Sony TVs and when they want to update software they do it when I switch the set off. They never do it when I switch it on or when I am watching something. Once my Samsung asked me if it could update software and gave me the option of ‘okay’ or ‘later’.

One would of course expect superior performance from superior and more expensive TVs such as Sony, Samsung, and the like.
Obviously we can’t expect top-notch performance or service in a budget TV like Vizio. I understood that when I bought this TV but had no idea what a nightmare it would become.

I hate my Vizio and will hate it until the day it appears on one of my videos as it is chewed up, shot, set on fire, blown up, dropped from a great height, or otherwise completely demolished. I recently finished 2 hours of fixing it which took me to my software guru.

Here’s what it was doing …

I could select input as ‘antenna’ or ‘watchfree’, both of which usually take you straight to antenna television but the TV only went to a screen saying ‘no signal’. After a while puttering with it I did a ‘complete factory reset’ which got me nowhere. It was then that my software guru entered the scene. He got me going after keeping it for a couple of days but mentioned the obvious shortcomings of this TV.

He said, “Expect this to happen again. The code within the software is so jumbled and has so much ‘junk code’ in it that the same problem could well happen again. My advice is to drop this off the nearest cliff or toss it into a wood chipper. Buy a ‘real’ TV and don’t go cheap this time.”

My own list of Cons:

● The remote control is cumbersome, inaccurate, hostile and the body is slippery. There is
nothing ‘intuitive’ about it. This is a perfect example of what ergonomics shouldn’t look like.

● The TV has the input jacks in the most difficult to reach place. If you’re mounting this TV on
the wall, good luck with that. It’ll mount but your mount plate will make access to inputs, etc.
a pain in the @ss.

● The speakers are on the bottom and fire downward. If this TV is on a stand on a shelf the
sound will be a little muffled.

● It’s ‘settings’ selection is ambiguous, confusing, and a challenge to even understand.

● It occasionally goes into ‘mute’ whenever you change a channel. This problem is intermittent.

This is a horribly contrived piece of garbage wrapped in plastic and with a 32 inch screen. I cannot possibly avoid condemning it. Oh, and it can take up to 15 to change channel.

Do yourself a favor; Buy Sony or Samsung if you can. If they are too price try LG and TCL, both of which are, in my opinion, much better choices than Vizio.

This has been an editorial opinion and a review of Vizio televisions and all opinions expressed are my own.

I’m Max, and that’s the way I see it!

WAIT: AN UPDATE ... My Vizio TV screwed me again! I'm done with it!