Someone tells me, "I heard Planar is no longer supporting Runco." Anyone know what they means? Have they actually BEEN supporting Runco?

They are doomed. Sam ought to buy it back and breath some life back into it. Bring back the awesome trainings in San Mateo with Pat, Andy, and Tin. :)

So what has been their story over the past few years? Have they still been selling Runco? Serving older models?

Aren't you the journalist?

What has their story been over the past few years?

[Link: marketing.planar.com]

Ahhhhhhh.......the good old days!

Excellent training.

Serious wining and dining.

Enjoying the company of others that you would have otherwise never met.

GREAT times that I will never forget!

Schooling his pool shark buddies at his favorite pool hall(THEY are the ones that insisted on $20 a game!) and living to talk about it was also a memorable experience! ;-)

And the endless service calls for failed product.

I still have a 480p plasma alive and kicking ass

That was the best part of Runco.
At least the parts I remember. Was almost like a boot camp to see how much knowledge you could retain while severely hung over.
Also: Blasting up hwy1 north of SF in a rented Audi on my day off from training…. EPIC!

But yeah… Service calls, lots and lots of service calls.

I hope the rumors of their demise are untrue, I have a quote I am working on where a LS12 got taken out when a theater flooded. I have 3 of their current (last couple of years) projectors out there and they have been trouble free (other then not being waterproof). I have a few more JVCs out there, have replaced one and had another need to be serviced.

Other then a rash of early LCDs with dead/stuck pixels, their flat panels were never really a problem.
The place I worked for at the time sold tons of the damn things. I only remember servicing two. One that had a Y-C board go out (fixed and returned to service) and my PL-50DHD that stopped responding to IR commands (serial still worked fine). I wound up with the 50, it was my main display for about 5 years. I retired it about a year ago because of no HDMI inputs. Still sitting in my storage.

Yeah, that's what I remember too Roddy!

Mike seems to be enthralled with the romance of the time, while all I can remember is the girl gave me the clap.

should have gone with one of those $500+ girls you talked about, not the $200 girls Kelly likes :)   and I too enjoyed the many failures...one home I worked on had 16 50"+ displays and all of them failed at least once, some twice, and the one that was the biggest PITA to get to failed 3 times....when they worked they looked great, but no way Jose for me...I pine for the days of Fujitsu or VT series Panasonics...looked great and never broke...

Apparently building bullet proof panels in those days was too tough for Runco, even though a few other companies were able to achieve it for much less money. Same thing with front projectors. It left me scratching my head and asking: WTF are they doing with all that money they are charging for these damn things? Mike's post brings clarity to that question.

Almost every time it ended up being a loose circuit board, likely jarred by DHL, which seemed to be their carrier of choice....when they worked and were calibrated they looked great...

I've only dealt with a couple Runco's in take over jobs. But I've only heard horror stories about selling them. I've heard over and over that they wouldn't fix anything under warranty, always blamed the customer for user error. The worst was one dealer I talked to claimed he had a DOA projector and Runco charged to repair it.

We have a couple Ronco projectors in the office waiting to go back. I am not in service so have not followed up. I lost track of how many projector issues we had when I was with EE in the bay area., a dozen easily that I was involved with.