Joined: Dec 2004 Gender: Male Posts: 266 Location: Italy - Rome
What's with Amstrad? « Thread Started on Apr 2, 2005, 12:24pm »
Amstrad was among the home computing pioneers. Not only they produced the famous CPC, but also some PCs. Perhaps their computers weren't the state of the art, but surely they weren't that bad. However nowadays Amstrad is producing cheap and low quality stuff, and I wonder why. Try to buy (at your own risk) an Amstrad DVD player, for instance, and see how long it lasts. I'm really really disappointed, what's wrong with them? Why don't they produce something good that can make them rise again? I mean, quality rather than quantity.
Joined: Dec 2005 Gender: Male Posts: 3 Location: Yorkshire, UK
Re: What's with Amstrad? « Reply #3 on Dec 15, 2005, 4:26am »
Hmmmm. Amstrad started importing cheap chinese hi-fi and whatever, selling them cheaply. I think they had another brand, Schneider, who were more up market, but I could be wrong on this.
The CPC stuff was a good machine, I had a 464 and loved it - though it never inspired me to program it like the C64 did.
Later on I was an electronic engineer working in the PC industry. When we got an Amstrad in for repair no one wanted to touch them. they would come in with floppy fauts or whatever and as soon as you opened the case something else went wrong. The main board was very cheaply made, thin compared to the IBM and Compaq ones, this caused issues with warping and the general consruction wasn't good. But they were designed to a price point and did start the drive downwards of prices.
I even go tthe official Amstrad training on these and will have the certificate somewhere. Possibly.
The CPC range seemed to be a pinnacle of quality for Amstrad, the rest of the stuff made cheaply, and still is. The hi-fi stuff was reliavle but sounded awful, I remebe one that had speakers about 4ft tall with about 6 driver units in. The trouble with bad sound is that it doesn't improve with more volume or distortion.
Everything at the cheap end of the market nowadays is simply a rebadged Chinese built unit, DVD or video. It doesn't matter what the name is on the front.
The trouble with producing quality stuff is that unless you have a brand name for quality, eg Sony, you can't produce a quality unit and sell it at a price where you would make money. If you had similar priced and specified DVD players, one was Sony and the other an Amstrad, which would you buy on previous experience?
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