Legal News: Dell sues 5 companies over LCD price-fixing

Looks like Dell is jumping into the legal ring, and many in the industry are celebrating the PC giant’s guts, even if they’re predicting it will be a long battle with few real victors. We’ve covered court related joy before here at SS, but this one may be huge.

The company has filed a lawsuit in a San Francisco court today against four LCD makers – Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Seiko Epson – and Taiwan-based HannStar as well. The crime they’re accusing the companies of, you may ask? The much-chronicled, much-discussed and reviled LCD price fixing scandal.

At least two of the companies mentioned (Sharp and Hitachi) have already come out and admitted involvement and paid fines in other cases, so it doesn’t appear they have a big defense really. We’ll keep an eye on this as it develops.

Lawsuit Blues: Toshiba loses $1 million DLP Bulb case

Toshiba’s bottom line hasn’t been faring so well of late, and now its taken another hit: they just lost a lawsuit involving replacing DLP bulbs.

New York courts decided that Toshiba needs to pay over $1 million to settle a class action lawsuit filed in 2007. The suit stated: ”the lamps of certain Toshiba DLP TV’s were susceptible to premature failure causing purchasers to repeatedly expend hundreds of dollars for replacement bulbs, which suffered from the same defect.”  On purpose, it seems to imply. Now many companies do this sort of thing in sneaky little ways, as a product that never breaks doesn’t make as much money.

After a long investigation, Toshiba was found to be responsible for replacing the bulbs and compensating the 265,000+ customers impacted. Warranties on bulbs was also extended to 1 year on affected models. Well, that’s how it goes…hopefully Toshiba will make sure to get their bulbs from a better source next time around.