LEXAR Back from the Dead ! :-)

They're just buying a name, that's all. It's like with Polaroid. It was a big name once upon a time, and it's been sold several times, to companies that do all sorts of different products, no rhyme or reason. It's just name recognition - it could be a camera this week or pantyhose next week. You can't conclude anything from their buying the business. They might do absolutely nothing other than simply slap the new name they bought on whatever it is that they were producing anyway. They make a card "Generic X", now they get to sell the very same card and say "Lexar". It doesn't mean that they are necessarily taking over production facilities and keeping the Lexar engineers employed. You can't conclude anything from this purchase, it might be that they're just buying the right to use these letters in sequence "Lexar", sum total.

And yes, tons of name brands in the West use Chinese production outsourcing. Including the biggest names. How do you think some of these Chinese off brands come up with exactly the same product at 1/10 the price? Because it comes from the same assembly line, in one case it gets the big brand name slapped on it, for 100% price and at night the same line produces stuff at 10% the price with a different label. Only the label is different (plus, things like support, warranty etc.).

I'm amazed at how well branding works, even with people who understand perfectly well what branding is. It's human nature to always go for that which they recognize. That's how the whole advertising industry works.
 
Pretty much about half to three quarters of your gear, household goods and any of your Apple products are already made in poor working conditions, right? Samsung and other Korean brands have a better employee treatment reputation than China but a good portion of Korean products might be assembled, subassembled or outsourced to Chinese contractors. Read about the employee suicide epidemic at Foxconn? http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30532463 Doesn't seem to hurt Apples sales too much. People say they are concerned, a few act as if they are concerned enough to do something and boycott certain products, but when it comes right down to it, all consumers all over the world consume products produced under poor conditions in all of the Asian and Indian parts of the world. Not many of us have the time to trace the convoluted origins of where everything we consume is made and so many items we buy are made there, assembled there, tested there, finished there. It's a pretty grey world.
 
I guess I just wonder if they're going to use the same employees, products, quality, etc., or have their Chinese employees make new memory cards, while disbanding the American division. If the latter, then how are they better than any Chinese knockoff, except that they paid for and inherited a once reputable brand name? I mean, if they're starting from scratch. As in, Chinese are known for knocking off products, at reduced prices, often because they used cheaper materials (and labor), which generally results in less reliable products. So if they come out with a new memory card, how do we know it will have the same reliability as the level of reliability that the Lexar brand has built up over the years?
 
Eric Coughlin said:
I guess I just wonder if they're going to use the same employees, products, quality, etc., or have their Chinese employees make new memory cards, while disbanding the American division. If the latter, then how are they better than any Chinese knockoff, except that they paid for and inherited a once reputable brand name? I mean, if they're starting from scratch. As in, Chinese are known for knocking off products, at reduced prices, often because they used cheaper materials (and labor), which generally results in less reliable products. So if they come out with a new memory card, how do we know it will have the same reliability as the level of reliability that the Lexar brand has built up over the years?
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Until proven otherwise and companies start putting Lexar back on their approved media list, I will assume that Lexar is basically the same as Komputer Bay. Longsys only bought the name. For all I know, though, Longsys may have been producing Lexar's flash the whole time although I seriously doubt it.
 
Eric Coughlin said:
Chinese are known for knocking off products, at reduced prices, often because they used cheaper materials (and labor), which generally results in less reliable products. So if they come out with a new memory card, how do we know it will have the same reliability as the level of reliability that the Lexar brand has built up over the years?
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This all depends on the product tier level. Cheap knockoffs on eBay tend to be of dubious quality but the middle and luxury level goods can't last if they're inferior to the other brands. And the Chinese only have the edge in the entry level product in terms of labor costs. And even there, the advantage is vs. the Western made goods. Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam have lower labor costs than the Chinese mainland.

PS. As a side note - back in the mid-80's, when I began working in consumer retail, the cheap/entry level products in TV's and VCR were Samsung and Gold Star. After several mergers, Gold Star was renamed LG.
 
cpreston said:
Until proven otherwise and companies start putting Lexar back on their approved media list, I will assume that Lexar is basically the same as Komputer Bay. Longsys only bought the name. For all I know, though, Longsys may have been producing Lexar's flash the whole time although I seriously doubt it.
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My understanding, only the name, "Lexar" was purchased by Longsys. The IP, etc. is still retained by Micron, who made/owned Lexar
 
DLD said:
This all depends on the product tier level. Cheap knockoffs on eBay tend to be of dubious quality but the middle and luxury level goods can't last if they're inferior to the other brands. And the Chinese only have the edge in the entry level product in terms of labor costs. And even there, the advantage is vs. the Western made goods. Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam have lower labor costs than the Chinese mainland.

PS. As a side note - back in the mid-80's, when I began working in consumer retail, the cheap/entry level products in TV's and VCR were Samsung and Gold Star. After several mergers, Gold Star was renamed LG.
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Most people don't remember that. LG= Lucky Gold Star.
 
I just find it appropriate because pretty much any time you get a complaint of a camera freezing during recording or freezing after a burst of photos, or most other conditions of freezing/locking up you get down to a Lexar card as the root cause. Especially with the Fuji cameras.
 
I've had a lot of issues with the 2000X 64GB SD Card. I'm on my third warrenty replacement. First one separated and the locking slider fell off. The second one just stopped working. Now this one the thin plastic bar that separates a set of contacts broke off. They have a very good warranty but this is getting ridiculous. I have a lot of older Class 10 cards that are fine and still working. I wont buy anymore Lexar SD cards moving forward.
I do wish SanDisk or one of the others would make a rugged V90 SD Card that doesn't separate or have the issues with that thin plastic divider. New cards have so many exposed contacts on them and seem to be getting more fragile with every new version.
 
Run&Gun said:
Most people don't remember that. LG= Lucky Gold Star.
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Speaking of TV brands - late 70's/early 80's still had a bunch of American names in the mix - GE, RCA (before GE acquired RCA/NBC), Zenith, Sylvania, Curtis Mathes, Magnavox (owned by Philips since 1976)- along with a few Japanese like Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, JVC, Sanyo and Hitachi. The US brands pretty much disappeared by the late 1980's. Jeffrey Kessler (of the Deflategate fame) tried an an anti-dumping suit against the Japanese but lost and pretty much every US TV manufacturer closed shop. The Japanese then dominated the 90's, with the Koreans entering the low end. By the mid-2000's, the Koreans were dominating the mid and splitting the high end with the Japanese, with the Chinese establishing the bridgehead at the low end. By now, the low end is entirely Chinese and, of the 80's-90's Japanese brands like Sony, NEC, Pioneer, Hitachi, JVC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, only Sony is doing fairly well. Pioneer, NEC and Mitsubishi exited the TV sector entirely and Panasonic is busy tweaking LG OLED panels. The big and growing names now are Vizio, TLC, Hisense, Haier ... until whoever replaces them a decade down the road.
 
DLD said:
Speaking of TV brands - late 70's/early 80's still had a bunch of American names in the mix - GE, RCA (before GE acquired RCA/NBC), Zenith, Sylvania, Curtis Mathes, Magnavox (owned by Philips since 1976)- along with a few Japanese like Sony, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, JVC, Sanyo and Hitachi. The US brands pretty much disappeared by the late 1980's. Jeffrey Kessler (of the Deflategate fame) tried an an anti-dumping suit against the Japanese but lost and pretty much every US TV manufacturer closed shop. The Japanese then dominated the 90's, with the Koreans entering the low end. By the mid-2000's, the Koreans were dominating the mid and splitting the high end with the Japanese, with the Chinese establishing the bridgehead at the low end. By now, the low end is entirely Chinese and, of the 80's-90's Japanese brands like Sony, NEC, Pioneer, Hitachi, JVC, Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, only Sony is doing fairly well. Pioneer, NEC and Mitsubishi exited the TV sector entirely and Panasonic is busy tweaking LG OLED panels. The big and growing names now are Vizio, TLC, Hisense, Haier ... until whoever replaces them a decade down the road.
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My family has been in the retail business for decades(60+ years) and when they still sold electronics, the main lines were Zenith(remember Allegro, too?), RCA, SHARP and GE. I believe SONY approached them in the 80's, but they turned them down. To my recollection, Zenith's VCR's and camcorders were made by JVC, but the TV's were actually Zenith designed and manufactured, at least well into the mid/to late 90's. Zenith was also at the forefront of research and testing for HD in the US, well back in the 90's. I also remember when Zenith began the changeover to basically being rebranded LG in the 00's(or maybe earlier...) before disappearing.

Speaking of Panasonic tweaking LG OLED panels, they have an OLED set that is only sold in Europe that just won a TV shootout in the UK.
 
Yup, Zenith VCR's were made my JVC. I had one of their 1989 4-head mono models myself. Of course, the actual drive mechanism may have been made by Shintom, which went out of business about a decade ago. Shintom was the main subcontractor for a bunch of manufacturers, the main one being Funai, that did a lot of private label merchandise.

Shintom branded VCR's were of such poor quality, I called them Ishtar. The name caught on at the place where I worked.
 
Your trip down memory lane has something else to do with this thread. Some of the US brands didn't disappear, they were bought, just like Lexar. Funai is a company in Japan that makes things in China and can stamp these names on them: Magnavox, Emerson, and Kodak, among others.

RCA began as an American subsidiary of a company in London, founded by an Italian, and General Electric bought it in 1919, then spun it off in '32. Then it bought it back in '86 but broke it up and sold it off again: its circuitry business to Harris, communications to MCI, its movie business to Sony, and NBC (which it founded) to Comcast. It spun off its lab into a company called SRI. It sold its records division to the German company BMG (which was bought by Sony) and its consumer electronics business to a French company called Thomson, which bought Grass Valley and made the Viper camera, and is now called Technicolor.

There's a riddle about a boat that needs repair after repair during its voyage. By the time it returns to shore, every plank has been replaced. So is it the same boat?

I've seen that even if company headquarters stays in the same place and is not bought out, the character and quality of its products change with who's in charge. RCA went downhill as soon as David Sarnoff died, even though it was taken over by his own son. Sony was on top of the world, but Akio Morita died in '99. It hasn't been the same since. Apple lost its way when it kicked out Steve Jobs. It was at the brink of death. Then he took over again in 1997, and it was the greatest turnaround in tech history. Then he died, and people have questioned if Apple again has lost its way. I think it's keeping course better than most, but that's likely because Steve Jobs tried really hard to establish its culture.
 
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combatentropy said:
... RCA began as an American subsidiary of a company in London, founded by an Italian, and General Electric bought it in 1919, then spun it off in '32. Then it bought it back in '86 but broke it up and sold it off again: its circuitry business to Harris, communications to MCI, its movie business to Sony, and NBC (which it founded) to Comcast. It spun off its lab into a company called SRI. It sold its records division to the German company BMG (which was bought by Sony) and its consumer electronics business to a French company called Thomson, which bought Grass Valley and made the Viper camera, and is now called Technicolor...
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Late 1990, I was working for one electronic chain and decided to check out a competing one. It was a few blocks from where I lived, so it wasn't really out of the way.

I stop off at their TV/VCR/video department. Some salesperson is setting up/adjusting the menu on a Proscan 32" model. This was our conversation.

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Me : Nice set. Foreign?

He : No, sir. One hundred percent domestic.

Me : It is? I thought Proscan was made by Thomson.

He : Yes, it is. Yes, it is.

Me : Well, isn't Thomson a French company?

He : Oh, no. It's like "Mister and Missus Thomson", as American as apple pie.

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I had no idea if the guy was told to fib or came up with the line himself. I ended up briefly working for that chain and in that very store a couple of years later. That salesperson was no longer around. The chain itself went out of business in two more years. It was a big chain too.
 
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