"And I defy you to produce ANY statistical evidence
to back up that statement. "

Maybe not his statement but some real world statistics I have gotton my
hands on from manufactures AND service contract companies.

For example, service contact companies base the percentages on having about
a 1 in 5 chance of an ordinary failure resulting in a claim payment over 5
years. That is 20% BTW. By some definitions a large percentage.

When Samsung first started selling the RPTV lines in the US, they had a
serious engineering defect which caused nearly a 100% failure within the
first two years.

Zenith's "L' and "M" line picture tube failures as tracked by Zenith
warranty claims showed over a 35% failure in the first two years. No
numbers for between 2 and 5 years which we did see an inordinately large
number of these.

Thomsons TOB ground problems were prevelant for about 4 years before they
got a handle on a solid fix at the factory. A very large percentage of
those failed within 2 to 3 years. Thomsons own numbers admitted to over a
50% failure during the first year warranty period on the first couple of
generations of the design.

In todays era of manufactures constant cost cutting, there has been an
increasing number of poor quality and reliability of design. How can we
know when the next cost cutting measure by a manufacture results in a sudden
almost total guaranteed failure of a product?

Take the el-junko capacitor situation from the last couple of years. I
cannot tell you how many consumer electronics products I have seen with
failing capacitors from the el-junk batch in all kinds of different
products.

There is more than enough evidence of an increasing number of poor quality
and reliability products across the board from many different manufactures
over the last 10 or so years to be wary of any long term reliability.

Maybe not the large percentage in two years by some peoples definition. But
the fact that Sony had to work extremely hard to get past the initial WEGA
XBR engineering problems to get the warranty claim rate to an acceptable
level is an indication that cost cutting has had an effect on quality and
reliability. FYI the WEGA line now has one of the lowest warranty claim
rates of any tv line on the market as of 2001 model year, somewhere around
3% failure the first year for all the models.