Yesterday I went to few electrical shops to look around, it was amazing to see so many LCD TV sets on display, must have been over 100 units of different models not including the stocks they have.

Come to think of it, TV are one of the more mass produced, frequently updated electronics out there and most of their shelf life is around 1 year. With such tough competition among different makers that keeps coming out new models every month, I wonder what happens to these units, surely they will end up with clearance but with so many models & makes, there will bound to have many units that can't be sold even well after their shelf life, so what happens to them?

Do they get shipped to poorer countries to be resold, scrapped, or returned back to factory for updates? Each maker produce so many models (Samsung have at least 3 models of same size each time), aren't the makers overproducing at the same time wasted resources & cost which could have lowered the retail price if they produced sufficient amount of units instead of flooding the market which end up with tons of electronic waste? TV are rather big in size as such the waste produced is more than small electronics. Is it because of the low cost of production in China that they couldn't care less about it?

now electronic products got lifespam.
PPl can track by: Heat of the components, how many time u suit on-off. & ect.

Do u know who invent the TV. Why the person who invent TV cannot get Nobel prize?????

regard the waste resource....human r selffish. If they don't waste it, how come the can earn much. Besides the TV , they r too many thing in Malaysia r waste nature resources.

At the end, no one will care about it, they only care r their profits only.

They remain on the shelf until somebody buys them. If they get too old, the shop reduces the price, and sell it off to people like me. Who don't look for TVs with the latest "features".

What makes you think TVs have a shelf life of 1 year? A TV is a TV. It shows pictures, and makes sound. Must be able to pick up shows coming down the antenna, and have an AV input for DVD players/games/satellite boxes/etc. That's about all I require out of my TV.

Compare TVs to handphones, computers, and digital cameras. Things that get "obsoleted" much faster.

What happens to those? The retailer leaves them on the shelfs. Periodically, they hold "sales" to get rid of the old stock. With some places, if sale fails to get rid of the old stock, they drop the price further, and put it in some bargain corner.

Some places drop the price far enough that the unwanted products get bought up by their own staff. If a few "sales" still fails to clear them, they might get bundled free with some other item, just to clear the shelf space.

I doubt they get exported to less developed countries. Why would they buy these things, when the manufacturers of the new stuff are selling there as well. The margin is probably not there to cover the cost of re-export.

However, this does happen with some industrial machinery costing anywhere from $10K plus to $100k to $1m. There are companies that buy these up, and reexport to other countries. Here, the price of the new equipment is high enough, that there is a large enough gap underneath to support the resale of used older models.

i don't understand, how can a tv have shelf life?

And erm, i think Tvs are not trending products like handphone where we always find for the latest one with the most features.

TVs , hmm.. they always do the same thing, don't they?

All electrical device has usage life and some component will decay / oxidize... Hi definition TV with multi-media capabilities only available in recent years and no longer lasts 10 years like those CRT that are meant to do the same thing.

Why? Money is needed to make those technologies and the next generation from LCD, Plasma to LED and the next need funding today. It is also much cheaper than in the past.

This is called mass production. Cheap to produce because got big factory doing all the jobs with cheap labors hence cheap selling because production is equal demand and that demand is billions of ppl..

Welcome to the world of capitalism