Samsung, junk or no?

[Lightages]

I have purchased my last Samsung product. I have purchased a number of their items over the past six years, most have failed and there is no help from Samsung in Chile.

Samsung Galaxy S2: While I had it, it was great. It got stolen after 1-1/2 years.
Samsung washing machine: 6 years still going.
Samsung Galaxy S3: Two have died slowly from various problems, and a third purchased as a replacement was DOA.
Samsung HM370 bluetooth earphone: still works, parts fell off.
Samsung SSD 840 EVO: Still works, but slowing down to 30MBps on some areas.
Samsung Level Link bluetooth audio gadget: Died within one year.

Samsung has no stated warranty in Chile. They leave it to the resellers to set their own warranty. Samsung won't even talk to me about warranties. "Talk to the store you purchased it from"

What is you experience with Samsung? You know what mine will be in the future, zero.

[CatalinaWOW]

I don't have any experience with their phone products.  I have bought, and do buy by preference, Samsung home appliances, audio and video equipment.  With those product lines my experience has been that they are far better than average on reliability.  Did have one DVD player fail after only a few years, but even that seems about par for the course in that technology.

[Mr.B]

My wife and I have quite a lot of Samsung gear.
From household appliances like our fridge and dishwasher to personal appliances like phones and tablets.
I have only had one failure: A 46" LCD TV that was 6 years old.
I replaced the caps in the main power supply and it gave me another year of service.
I could have repaired it again (possibly), but it was the perfect excuse to upgrade to a 60" version.

So, all and all we are pretty happy with the reliability of the brand.

[retiredcaps]

Samsung SSD 840 EVO: Still works, but slowing down to 30MBps on some areas.

I don't have a Samsung SSD, but I do remember hearing about firmware updates being important to SSD.

A quick search shows this is a known problem and Samsung issued a patch or patches.

http://www.techspot.com/news/60362-samsung-fix-slow-840-evo-ssds-periodic-refresh.html

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-fix-a-slow-samsung-solid-state-drive/

[BravoV]

Smartphone > 6 , dishwasher, washing machine .. all fine for years

Local support is also very excellent, like my washing machine experienced broken panel, still within warranty, a phone call, asked the problem details, next day a repair man came with a new panel board, sealed in a box, and replaced it without any question asked, and I paid nothing at all. 

Also the authorized service center and spare-parts depo happened just about 15 minutes drive from home.

[BradC]

Samsung SSD 840 EVO: Still works, but slowing down to 30MBps on some areas.

Get rid of it. The firmware updates just perform a background periodic refresh, use up the lifetime and the drive will never really be great. I certainly would not trust it.

I have some 830's and 850's here and they are all solid. I unfortunately put an 840 in my brothers Macbook and it has been an unmitigated disaster.
Every day has a dog, and the 840 is Samsungs dog.

[Kilrah]

I've had or have in total 4 TVs, 56 phones, a tablet, an SSD, a watch, a monitor. One phone (S4) had a a volume button fail and was quickly repaired under warranty. No other issue, and very happy with the products.

EDIT: Forgot a phone and monitor.

[Corporate666]

Never had any notable problems with my Samsung gear, BUT, I did buy a Galaxy S6 to replace my Galaxy S3, and literally 7 days out of warranty the phone died.  At first they tried to bounce me back to the cell provider (who gives replacement refurbished phones at a discount), but my phone was in mint condition and lightly used, so I pushed back.  They eventually did agree to fix it under warranty, although it was not Samsung, it was some 3rd party company in Texas who handled it.

They had to replace the internal motherboard and battery and a charging board, and it irritated me that when it came back, there were some small scratches around the edge where they had pried the case open.

Not sure if I will buy Samsung again - it was probably a fluke it happened in the first place.  We'll see.

[JPortici]

i have had several samsung in the past. some shit phones, some ok phones, some home appliances
I'm not used in changing the washing machine or the oven over less than 5-10 years so i can't talk in that aspect

however, i have had three samsung phones.
two of them were some cheap ass shit phones for the time (~150 euro). the third one, which is my current phone, is in the same price group but boy, quality of the thing is great!
And when i was a samsung sales promoter i had a long time with the high end ones

What can i say? i want to remind you that these are goods that are expected to be sold in volumes of at least 10s of millions, of course there will be a number of lesser quality/doa units.
But in the two years i've worked in store i probably have seen 10.000 samsung phones going out with maybe 6 DOA from samsung phones
- 4 low tier, battery dead
- 1 mid tier, battery dead
- 1 high tier, battery dead
and about 10 people coming back requesting assistance because "it heated too much" (crapped out battery that expanded in low tier phones. in high tier phones problem solved most of the time by just restoring the firmware to stock. crazy, right?)
- i won't count all the people that came back with spills/cracked screens. if the customer's an idiot it's not the manufacturer's fault. but that number would but samsung on par with other manufacturers for percentage of returns, which is interesting

Now if you want to discuss other brands
HTC: Not many sold, but more than one person every two who bought one came back for servicing within the year because it heated too much/the screen crapped out/the camera gave false colours, glitches,..
Huawei: they sold real big shit inside shit cans until about two years ago. crap phones that got hot if only you looked at them. maybe they were too shy?
LG: sold okay numbers, much higher servicing/returns radio than samsung

there were other minor brands that we sold but nothing relevant. same for nokia/microsoft and apple

one interesting fact i also worked a couple of months for a newer brand a couple of years ago. i had 10 units of a model, 7 of them were dead. and i mean, DEAD. battery dead (tested with working units) but if you tried a working battery on the non working one they still didn't turn on.
5 units of another model, 2 DOA.. and so on. Which is why i don't trust any of the new players in the phone area. Give me a samsung that has a million nerds improving it for me on the side

Now, about the warranty, i'm sorry man but that's up to your country's customer laws. customer service is big big big money, if they can avoid it they won't spend a dime.

all penny's worth in the end but eh, it's no secret that samsung's mobile division has been on a downhill for years.
they cut in half us promoters every 6 months and you know what they say about the dying foot? you start see the effect on the tip of the toes.

they dropped us, then sales number went downhill, so then they dropped more of us because our agency don't do shit. we don't promote well, so corporate pays less money to the agency so less money for us so they can keep less of us.

then corporate decide to change the agency because it's clear that's our fault (but we get all hired to the new agency) and the cycle goes on and on.
What it's so hard to understand for the corporate in the fact that if there are no people shoving their products down the customer's throat, the customer will buy apple for high end, or huawei for mid to low end because they already do massive amount of advertising?   
- End of rant. i don't evend do this job anymore, thank god, but i felt it was worth sharing.

[rollatorwieltje]

My biggest issue with Samsung is their software. It's consistently garbage and they pretty much don't support anything after the product is released.

Galaxy S3 mini, perfect hardware, horrible software that kills the battery. Now using Cyanogenmod, infinitely better.

Galaxy Tab Pro 8.4. Same as the phone, perfect hardware, horrible software. Occasionally have to open it up to disconnect the battery, otherwise it won't charge correctly. Probably a bug in the battery monitor chip/driver. No support at all from Samsung. In their infinite wisdom they also blocked NTP time sync on this device and the internal clock is shit (which shouldn't matter if it had NTP support), it drifts about 1 minute per month.

Samsung 32C650 TV. Nice TV, again horrible software. Supports DLNA, but won't swallow anything unless it has a specific mime type. It play pretty much any common file type, but you have to send it as if it's an AVI file or something stupid like that. Also the Smart TV bullshit on it is bad. Recently they removed Youtube, because fuck you that's why. The rest of the apps are also proprietary and very poorly supported.

Not sure if I will buy anything from them again, this total lack of support is getting old.

[wraper]

Samsung SSD 840 EVO: Still works, but slowing down to 30MBps on some areas.

Update the firmware, it's a known problem. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9196/samsung-releases-second-840-evo-fix

[wraper]

The firmware updates just perform a background periodic refresh, use up the lifetime and the drive will never really be great. I certainly would not trust it.

The tradeoff is that it does consume P/E cycles to refresh the data, but by our own calculations even 5 years of refreshes at 1/week would only be 26% of the drive’s rated 1000 cycle lifetime.

[BradC]

The firmware updates just perform a background periodic refresh, use up the lifetime and the drive will never really be great. I certainly would not trust it.

The tradeoff is that it does consume P/E cycles to refresh the data, but by our own calculations even 5 years of refreshes at 1/week would only be 26% of the drive’s rated 1000 cycle lifetime.

Fair call. Now try going on holiday and leaving your laptop off for 3 months and then coming home to see how much of your data is left.. Hint.. not much.
Like I said, the firmware update is a hack because the retention time of the TLC they are using there is lousy. Provided you are on 24/7 or for long stretches every week you'll be "okay" (for certain definitions of ok), but don't leave it off for a while and expect your data to be there when you come back.

[Kilrah]

Galaxy S3 mini, perfect hardware, horrible software that kills the battery. Now using Cyanogenmod, infinitely better.

Interesting, since I have one on stock FW as a standby phone and it happily does a full week on a charge with no use.

[linux-works]

samsung has questionable ethics.  I avoid them like I avoid sony when possible.

samsung got in the new a few times for their spying smart tv's.  and they also make you sign a suspicious eula before they give you a windows laser printer driver (already discussed on eev).  I don't like their terms (sending data to sammy when I print!) so I save my files as pdf and then go to a linux box and 'lpr' from there, without any stupid sign-your-life-away terms.

samsung has the rep that they design gear to last the warranty period +2 weeks.  I mostly believe they design stuff to last SHORT durations.  fully believe they do that to keep us rebuying things.

also heard that the work environment at samsung is not very good.  beds in some buildings where they expect you to stay over for 'critical projects' (ie, most of them).  I interviewed at samsung in san jose and was totally unimpressed with the corp 'culture' and process.

their phones suck, their software is worse.  they know nothing about security and could care less.

but then again, this describes MOST consumer electronics companies.  the global race to the bottom has ruined so much of the world, truth be told.  when things are only 'built to a cost' this is what we get.

[ajb]

My biggest issue with Samsung is their software. It's consistently garbage and they pretty much don't support anything after the product is released.

This has been my experience as well.  I have a Galaxy tablet, admittedly a lower end model, but the customized version of Android it runs is obnoxious, with uninstallable crapware and stupid/missing features.  Unfortunately it has an unusual SoC, so little to no options for running a different ROM.

Even worse is my Samsung laptop.  I got a good deal on it, and the hardware is quite nice, but the driver situation is fucked.  It shipped with Win8, and I tried to update to 8.1 when that came out, but Samsung hadn't updated their drivers and the laptop became completely unusable until I restored it to stock.  The only way to get drivers for the thing is through their stupid "Samsung Update" app, which doesn't allow for uninstalling or rolling back updates.  The core drivers, eg video, are customized so I can't even install stock drivers from the GPU manufacturer, I have to wait for them to trickle through Samsung's process and to the app.  At the moment I can't control the brightness of the display, and there's fuck all I can do to fix it, because I can't even try to uninstall or reinstall any of the potential culprits.  I've been meaning to put in an SSD and try a fresh Win10 install, but I'm anticipating it being a nightmare to get everything working again.  I came very close to chucking it recently, and my next laptop definitely won't be a Samsung.

[nanofrog]

Only 2 phone products (2x Galaxy S5's), an HDTV, and Blu-ray player. They're all still going (TV & BDP are ~7 yrs old, 1 phone is ~2yrs, and the other ~ 6mo.).

Only issues with the phones have been battery life after certain updates, which were later fixed. BDP doesn't like being routed through an HDMI switch, so has to have it's own port on the TV. HDTV has some issues with the HDMI ports (port 1 is fine), which I've not gotten around to yet (still need to finish assembling the benches  ). I've been given a gift of another HDTV that needs repair, which I've not gotten to either.

[madires]

Several years ago I bought a few hard disk drives (80GB up to 160GB) which were fine. I can't think of any other Samsung product I got, but I fixed some for relatives and friends. No extreme failure rates, just average.

[wraper]

The firmware updates just perform a background periodic refresh, use up the lifetime and the drive will never really be great. I certainly would not trust it.

The tradeoff is that it does consume P/E cycles to refresh the data, but by our own calculations even 5 years of refreshes at 1/week would only be 26% of the drive’s rated 1000 cycle lifetime.

Fair call. Now try going on holiday and leaving your laptop off for 3 months and then coming home to see how much of your data is left.. Hint.. not much.
Like I said, the firmware update is a hack because the retention time of the TLC they are using there is lousy. Provided you are on 24/7 or for long stretches every week you'll be "okay" (for certain definitions of ok), but don't leave it off for a while and expect your data to be there when you come back.

That prevents slow read, not data loss. With older firmware which didn't refresh the data after some time it was read slow but not lost. Once cell partially discharge, threshold voltage levels are adjusted until the data read succesfully passes integrity check. But this takes time, therefore data is read slowly. Also that 1 week figure is completely arbitrary, just to show that drive lifetime won't be significantly affected.

[AlessandroAU]

My 840 evo has 12,000 power on hours, 10TB written to disk., 50 wear levelling counts (the NAND will survive 1000-3000), never skipped a beat on me.

[nanofrog]

BDP doesn't like being routed through an HDMI switch

There are HDMI splitters that implements HDCP decoding (of course, illegal), so you can get split deciphered HDMI output.

By chance do you know of any?

Might become a necessity if I can't sort the HDMI ports on the TV. Certainly easier... 

[nanofrog]

Search HDCP splitter on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4K-2K-HDMI-Splitter-Signal-Distributor-1-in-2-Out-with-1080P-3D-HDCP-/262430613338?hash=item3d1a155f5a:g:foMAAOSw~oFXMgD3

Thanks.  Easy on the wallet too. 

[grumpydoc]

2xTV including the infamous "D" series plus various HDD's - no problems.

Ethics is an issue but pretty soon if you refuse to buy from unethical manufacturers you run out of brands that you will buy!

[BravoV]

Search HDCP splitter on eBay.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/4K-2K-HDMI-Splitter-Signal-Distributor-1-in-2-Out-with-1080P-3D-HDCP-/262430613338?hash=item3d1a155f5a:g:foMAAOSw~oFXMgD3

Thanks.  Easy on the wallet too. 

Meh .. try search at Aliexpress.   

[rstofer]

but then again, this describes MOST consumer electronics companies.  the global race to the bottom has ruined so much of the world, truth be told.  when things are only 'built to a cost' this is what we get.

The alternative is a product delivered 5 years late at 10 times the cost.

We live in a 'good enough' world by our own choosing.  Look at the raging debates over the Rigol 1054Z oscilloscope.  It's 'good enough' but the detractors are quick to point out that you can get a scope that is twice as good if you're willing to spend 5 times as much money.

We have a bunch of Samsung stuff around (in fact, the monitor in front of me and the one to my right) and it has all been outstanding.  No problems whatsoever.  Both of our large-screen TVs are Samsung and they are several years old, still working well.