Posted by Kulvinder Singh Matharu on 11/07/07 19:17

On Tue, 6 Nov 2007 17:35:53 -0500, Rita Ä Berkowitz <ritaberk2O04
@aol.com> wrote:

>Bob Myers wrote:
>
>>>>> And you think the MTBF of a CRT monitor is...what?
>>>
>>> It's irrelevant.
>>
>> It's completely relevant. You claimed that the "longevity"
>> of LCD monitors was poorer than that of CRTs - therefore
>> the MTBF of the CRT technology is most definitely part of
>> that equation.
>
>Not from an end-user's perspective when the LCD monitor dies quicker than
>the stated MTBF. Most unsuspecting consumers are falsely lead to believe
>that the whole unit has a chance of lasting the stated MTBF.

[snip]

Apologies for jumping in, but I think that I need to clarify that
MTBF is not related to the useful life of a product. The useful life
of a product *can be* much, much shorter than its MTBF as MTBF
normally assumes steady state failure rates between the burn-in and
wear-out stages and assumes that products are replaced before
reaching the wear-out stage.

For example: hard discs can have an MTBF of, say, 20 years but the
useful life is normally between 3 and 5 years dependent upon the
actual model.

And I fully agree with you that LCDs, etc will have service lives
much shorter than the MTBF and the average consumer can be easily
mislead (I think deliberately by manufactures) that these products
have long service lives. I've yet to see the service life quoted in
brochures but instead I see these impressive, but nominally useless,
MTBF figures.

--
Kulvinder Singh Matharu

Website : www.metalvortex.com
Contact : www.metalvortex.com/contact/

Brain! Brain! What is brain?!

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