Compact Discs and Digital Video Discs have an aura of immortality about them. Unlike those scratchy old vinyl records or those blurry and muffled videotapes, optical discs are not supposed to wear out. Evidently, the same cannot be said for their players and recorders.

In this weekly installment of our product warranty tour, we surveyed 23 manufacturers of CD and DVD players and recorders, and canvassed 160 of their products for features, price, and warranty period. What we found was that almost 10% of the units carried only 90-day parts warranties, despite selling prices up to $550. Fifteen manufacturers offered at least some units with only 90-day labor warranties.

Only Sony provided parts or labor warranties longer than one year, for some of their top of the line "ES" units. Most of their CD and DVD products carried one-year parts and labor warranties, though some of the low end DVD/VCR combination units carried 90 days for both. And rather surprisingly, one of Sony's high end digital video recorders, the DHG-HDD250 with a 250 gigabyte hard drive, its own television tuner, and High Definition TV compatibility, carried only 90 days of labor coverage, despite its $800 list price.

Parts Warranties vs. Labor Warranties

So what's wrong with 90-day labor warranties? Nothing, if the unit fails out of the box, or shortly thereafter. But if a repair is required after the three months are up, it may turn into a consumer disposal rather than a warranty claim once the customer discovers that they'll have to pay for repair time, not to mention shipping in both directions. And we do mean discover: some retailers still neglect to mention that there even is a warranty, despite pre-sale disclosure laws that have been on the books for three decades. Others will list only the parts warranty period, neglecting to mention that the labor warranty period is far shorter. We suspect not all of these omissions are inadvertent.

If you'll recall last week's column on hard disk drive and flash memory warranties, 90-day periods were much less common for those product types, and five-year or even lifetime warranties were more plentiful. In fact, with computers, printers, and monitors, it wasn't necessary to use separate columns for parts and labor warranty periods. One could wonder if shorter warranties mean optical disc drives are more or less reliable than magnetic media, especially since some of the same manufacturers sell both.

There are, of course, mitigating factors. First, CD and DVD are more a part of the home audio/consumer electronics branch of the family, while hard disk drives and USB drives are traditionally classified as computer products. Second, when your CD or DVD drive fails, you don't lose all your data, even if you do toss the unit in the trash. Third, it's only the internal hard drives that get the longer warranties. A year is more typical for the external units. Still, it's puzzling that none of the internal CD-ROM or DVD-RW drives we surveyed carried anything longer than a year's warranty.

The End of the CD Era?

Digital cameras and MP3 players, which we covered two weeks ago in an August 15 column, are hastening the emergence of the home computer as an entertainment hub. CDs and DVDs are also part of that convergence, but what's even more interesting is the crossover of computer technology back into the TV and music recording businesses. For instance, some of the latest digital video recorders are built around huge 250 gigabyte disk drives. And most of the CD and DVD players we surveyed now support a long list of digital image and audio file standards from the computer world.

One surprising conclusion we've reached is that it's becoming more and more difficult to buy a non-portable CD-only piece of consumer electronics, especially in regards to recorders. Many of the CD recorders can at least play the DVD format, if not record in it as well. We found only a handful of CD-R-only or CD-RW-only units for sale as a computer drive, although we're sure the refurbishers still have many of the older models on their shelves. On the consumer electronics side, most of the CD-only units were either very-low-end portable Walkman-like devices or high-end multi-disc duplication towers.

We are going to assume that all DVD recorders and players can also play CDs, so we're not going to make any mentions of that attribute in the product descriptions that follow. Most of the current DVD units can also play CD-R, CD-ROM, CD-RW, MP3, JPEG, WMA, bitmap, and many other formats that come out of the PC world. So we didn't really pay attention to all those acronym-laden specs, because they're becoming somewhat universal. What's becoming unusual is finding a CD player that doesn't support either MP3 or WMA, or a DVD player that can't play CDs. We also didn't get too deep into all the various read, write, and rewrite speeds, except when they seemed to have some bearing upon warranty.

The Next Generation: Disk vs. Disc

Where it gets interesting is when the DVD recorder also includes a hard drive, allowing for both the incidental and temporary taping of weekly TV programs and the permanent archival to disc of "important" content. Some units include their own TV tuner and/or a satellite TV receiver, allowing them to operate independently of the viewer and his current viewing choice. A few can even record two different signals simultaneously, while the viewer watches yet a third. And then there are all the DVD units that also include a video cassette recorder/player function, almost always in the standard VHS format.

We've tried to note some of these specs in the descriptions that come after the brand and model numbers below. But what we really searched for were players and recorders that conform to any of the newer high-fidelity or high-resolution formats. For instance, HDMI is the High Definition Multimedia Interface, which identifies video players equipped to be compatible with High Definition TV. SACD is the Super Audio Compact Disc format, which provides better sound quality and more storage space per disc. And then there's Blu-ray, so named because it uses a blue laser beam to read high-resolution video discs that have larger capacities than today's DVDs. If one is concerned about superior picture or sound quality, these would be the acronyms that identify the superior players, changers, and recorders.

Then there are the "underground" formats. As MP3 is to plain CD audio, DivX is to plain DVD video. As a compressed format, it requires less storage space per minute, so that a full-length DivX movie could quite possibly fit onto a CD-R (also known as a video CD). Plus, DivX has the added cache of its pirate origins, just like MP3. While the DVD format was locked up by Hollywood until a teenager broke the copy protection code, DivX began in Europe as a quasi-legal modification of Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Now it's supported on DVD players sold by LG Electronics, Philips, Toshiba, and others.

The following lists represent a cross-section of each manufacturer's respective DVD and CD player and recorder product lines. It wasn't our intent to list each and every unit available from these 23 manufacturers. Instead, we looked for some representatives of the low end, the midrange, and the high end of each of their product line. First we listed the manufacturers alphabetically. We then listed each of their product lines based on warranty period, from shortest to longest, and then on price, again in ascending order.

Careful readers will notice that some of the units in the above list aren't DVD recorders at all. Instead, they're satellite television receivers equipped with a hard disk drive that can capture programming much like a VCR, holding it in memory until a playback is requested. Some also include DVD recorders, but many don't. However, since the line between DVD recorders and digital video recorders (DVRs) is blurring so quickly, we decided to combine them into one chart.

Not a One-Year Warranty?

On the list above, JVC has a combined DVR/DVD recorder that sells for $1,500. Incredibly, its labor warranty is only 90 days. However, that doesn't mean it's likely to get tossed out if it breaks after 91 days. What it means is the owner is going to pay. Either they can pay up front by purchasing a service contract that covers labor charges, or they can pay later when they discover the labor isn't really free, despite their mistaken impression that their unit carried a one-year warranty.

On the list below, five products sell for $1,000 or more, including two DVD players from Sony, one from Onkyo, and a top-of-the-line audiophile unit from Denon that carries the incredible list price of $3,800. But the biggest surprise is that the brand new Samsung BD-P1000 -- the only Blu-ray unit currently shipping -- carries only a 90-day labor warranty despite its $1,000 list price. So obviously, the most expensive units don't always have the longest warranties.

On the list below, Sony has a 400-disc DVD player that carries a five-year parts and labor warranty -- the longest warranty period in the optical disc market. But it also sells two DVD players at the opposite extreme. For instance, on the SLV-D370P and SLV-D560P combination DVD player and VCR units, Sony issues a warranty that provides for free replacements up to 90 days after purchase. From days 91 to 365, Sony will replace the unit with a refurbished unit "for a replacement fee," as its warranty card explains. What is that fee? We had to call Sony to find out. The technician said the fee would include all charges for parts, labor, and shipping. In other words, it's a 90-day warranty, dressed up as a one-year warranty.

We found five portable DVD players with built-in LCD screens that carried 90-day parts warranties. But we found twice as many portable units that carried one-year parts warranties. However, only two portables carried one-year warranties for both parts and labor, so perhaps there is some correlation between intended use and warranty period. Interestingly, both JVC and Sony tagged their combination DVD/VCR units with 90-day parts warranties, which supports the theory that these all-in-one units are somehow less reliable than the components are separately. Then again, Samsung and Toshiba extended their usual one-year parts warranties to their DVD/VCR units, so perhaps they're not so unreliable after all.

The following two lists are much shorter than the lists above, primarily because we could find only 13 manufacturers who sell units that either play or record CDs that don't also play or record DVDs. Take away the multiple disc CD changers and the Walkman-sized portable players, and these lists would be short indeed. Soon to join the LP turntable and the 8-track tape player in the museum: the single disc CD player. It may take much longer to kill off CD burners, though, especially since the MP3 and DivX formats can make such efficient use of the CD-ROM's 700 megabytes of available space.

The units on the list below range in price all the way from $16 for the Audiovox portable to $3,000 for the top-of-the-line Sony unit. They also represent the extremes of warranty, at 90 days and five years, respectively. But in between those extremes are a whole lot of one-year warranties on products price between $100 and $250. In fact, if you eyeball the list below and then go back to the three lists above, you'll see that one-year labor warranties are more common, and 90-day labor warranties are less common, with CD players than they are with DVD players.

We found a similar effect with computer monitors, where CRT screens had longer warranties than LCD units, and in computer printers, where the old dot-matrix machines had longer warranties than any of today's fancy technologies. So perhaps the old stuff lasts longer? Or perhaps it takes a few decades to get to the tail end of the pareto charts? Ironically, if any of the products on the list below were to break, they'd probably be replaced with units that offer more features, more formats, and less warranty.

Summer Warranty Tour Continues

In future columns, we'll take a look at the sound cards, TV tuners, and graphics cards that are also helping to turn the PC from a fancy typewriter into a home entertainment hub. And then we'll take a look at a few of the more traditional sectors of the consumer electronics, office equipment and major appliance industries, before turning back to the automotive sector for a look at all the vehicles bigger than a pickup truck. Then, if there's enough weeks left in the summer, we'll take a look at aerospace, marine, medical, telecom, and sports equipment, not to mention new homes, fixtures, furniture, and building materials.

Automotive Warranties

• Passenger Cars & Light Trucks

Computer Warranties

• Handhelds
  
• Notebooks
  
• Desktops
  
• Workstations
  
• Internal Hard Drives
  
• External Hard Drives
  
• Flash Memory Devices
  
• Monitors
  
• Printers
  
• Copiers
  
• Scanners
  
• Fax & Copier
  
• Fax Phone & Copier
  
• Three-in-One Office Machine (scan, copy & print)
  
• Four-in-One Office Machine (fax, scan, copy & print)

Consumer Electronics

• Televisions Over 50"
  
• Televisions 30" to 50"
  
• Televisions Under 30"
  
• Digital Projectors
  
• Digital Video Recorders
  
• Digital Cameras
  
• DVD Players
  
• CD Recorders
  
• MP3 Players