OK.  This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  After dealing with Insignia’s (Best Buy’s brand) “technical support” people, I decided it was time to share my frustration with the world.

Last Sunday, I purchased an Insignia brand 19″ 720p LCD TV/DVD Combo from Best Buy for our bedroom.  It looked nice in the store and my wife wanted something that could play DVDs.  The price was decent enough ($229).

After I connected the TV and had it all set up, I was checking out all the settings.  I noticed that buried deep in the setup menus was a “Wake Timer” and a “Sleep Timer”.  I love those features.  The Wake Timer makes a good second alarm clock, and the Sleep Timer is nice to have so I don’t leave the TV on all night because I fell asleep.

The first odd thing I noticed was that the Wake Timer included a Year, Month, and Day setting.  If that wasn’t odd enough, it didn’t allow me to select “any year” or “any month”.  In essence, I could only set the Wake Timer to a single time in history!  On one of my other TVs (20 years old), I’m used to leaving the time at 7:00AM and having it work every day I enabled it.  This TV would force me to set the actual date I wanted to have it “wake” me EVERY TIME I wanted to use it!  Did I mention the Wake Timer setup was DEEP IN THE SETUP MENUs?

Secondly, I found that the Sleep Timer (in the same deep setup menu as the Wake Timer) allowed me to set the shut off delay to 5, 10, 15, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, … minutes.  Not bad.

What troubled me is that there is no button on the remote to enable and disable the Sleep Timer or the Wake Timer.  If I wanted to use either of these 2 features, I needed to go into setup, select Settings, scroll down to Time, and then scroll down to Sleep Timer or Wake Timer.  I counted AT LEAST 16 button pushes just to set the Sleep Timer.

I use the Sleep Timer when I’m going to bed, which means I’m probably a little tired already, and I usually dimmed the lights already.  I don’t want to play with the remote and have to hit 16 buttons in the correct order just so the TV can shut itself off in an hour!  Similarly, if I want the TV to turn on in the morning, I need to go through the setup menus and set the DATE and time (at least 16 button pushes on the remote) every single night!

I decided to call Insignia’s technical support line to see if there was some short-cut I was missing?  I dialed the number on the back of the TV manual and was handed to an “automated assistance” system (you have no idea how much I HATE those things!).  After asking a few questions, it stated it was forwarding me to the appropriate department.  I heard a little ringing, then silence.  More silence.  After an unreasonable period of silence, I hung up and tried again.  Same thing… silence.  I tried a third time.  Finally, I got to talk to a real person.

After a bunch of silly questions that had nothing to do with my actual questions/concerns, I described my situation to the tech support guy.  I asked him “how do I activate the Wake Timer and Sleep Timer from the remote?”  He said I can only use those timers via the setup menus.  I questioned the usefulness of a simple feature like a Sleep Timer that was so complex to set up and use.  After poking around his notes, he asked to put me on hold “for just a few seconds” while he investigated it further.

Eight minutes later, he came back on the line and told me that the Wake Timer and Sleep Timer features were “not very common” and that’s why the remote doesn’t have buttons for them.  His reasoning was that if there was a button on the remote that activated the Sleep Timer, and if a customer accidentally pushed that button, the customer would be confused when the TV shut itself off and the customer would bring the TV back to the store for repair thinking it was broken!

In essence, Insignia was worried that stupid customers would not realize what the Sleep Timer was and think their TV was broken if they accidentally enabled it because it’s “not a common feature”!!

Best Buy and Insignia must think they have really stupid customers!!