Ask Dethroner: Are Best Buy’s Insignia Brand HDTVs Worth Buying?

Vic writes:

Best Buy’s in-store brand, Insignia, has some TVs that are cheaper than their Sony/Samsung/etc. counterparts. Is it “safe” to save $100-$200 off and by the store-brand stuff, or shell out the money for name-brand?

It all depends on how you define “safe.” Best Buy’s Insignia brand launched two years ago with the stated intention of finding holes in the consumer electronics landscape and plugging them with discount products. They don’t aim to be the best so it’s not fair to expect them to be.

And for the money you save, you can buy one of those protection plans to upgrade your warranty, making you very “safe.” Or you could buy a nicer HDTV.

CNET has only rated one Insignia-brand HDTV, a CRT-based model that sells for a little over $400—and they weren’t big fans, giving it a 4.2 out of 10. That’s about the only professional review of an Insignia-brand TV online (Consumer Reports is said to have given Insignia a “favorable rating,” but obviously their review isn’t online), which means either the gadget writers aren’t getting review models from Best Buy or they care so little about the brand that they don’t bother testing the units.

The problem with judging one Insignia product from another is that each product is likely manufactured by different vendors, even within the same product categories. So that CRT HDTV might have been crap, but another model might have been cooked up by an entirely different manufacturer.

All that said, it’s pretty clear that the Insignia brand is the bottom of the barrel based on price alone. Best Buy may be saving money by contracting deals directly with the manufacturers, but they don’t make a huge markup on things like HDTVs in the first place. (That’s why they sell $6 cables for $60—that’s where the money is.) If your only requirement for a new HDTV is “bigger” and “cheap as possible,” you’ll probably be happy with something from Insignia. Otherwise, I’d be prepared to shell out just a little more for a better brand—until someday, inevitably, Best Buy contracts an Insignia product with a really gung-ho manufacturer who makes a surprisingly high-quality product that becomes the darling of the bargain electronics community.

That hasn’t happened yet.

Brand Home Page [Insignia-Products]

See Also: Low End Theory: Insignia: Mark of the Least