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Old 13th Apr 2018, 9:08 pm   #1
'LIVEWIRE?'
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Question What has become of Sharp?

As most members will know, back in the 70s and through to the 90s, Sharp were a prominent manufacturer of a wide range of consumer electronic products, most of which were of decent quality. They were also backed up with good after-sales service. Manuals and spare parts were readily available from Willow Vale Electronics, themselves now defunct. I once owned a SG500E Music Centre, which I only scrapped when the D.D. turntable developed faults, which couldn't be repaired due to non-availability of spares, but by then the 500E was over 25 years old, probably nearer 30. Currently I have a Sharp Microwave Oven, which must be getting on for 20 years old (still working O.K., b.t.w.), but I haven't seen any Sharp products advertised or displayed anywhere for several years, now. Anyone know what's become of Sharp?
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 9:26 pm   #2
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.the...taiwan-company
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 9:36 pm   #3
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I was talking with my Dad recently about some far eastern manufacturers going up & down in the marketplace.

While Sharp seemed to rarely be at the leading edge of technology, they normally made some decent products.

Some of the Japanese brands seem to have a very low profile these days, not just Sharp.

Certainly when I was buying a new TV last time some former big names had hardly anything to offer.

I presume with an ageing workforce, & being unable to compete with Chinese & Korean makers while keeping up the quality, many Japanese companies seem to just sell badge engineered products these days, or else outsource all their production.

It's been a while since I actually saw some consumer electronics actually made in Japan.
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 9:43 pm   #4
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I hadn't seen that article, dazzlevision, and, if I'd read about Sharp being taken over at the time, I'd forgotten. Many years ago the emergence of large Japanese Corporations was one of the factors in the demise of British & European Consumer Electronics companies, now it seems that, in their turn, the Japanese firms are being squeezed out by companies in Taiwan, S. Korea, Malaysia, and of course, Mainland China.
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 9:47 pm   #5
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

For some time now they've been availing themselves of contract manufacturing. Back in the early 1990s, a mate of mine who used to work for a well-known amusement park in the vicinity fitted out the retail units with Sharp intelligent tills in all the outlets. He was so pleased with the result that he bought the latest Sharp TV (one of those with a postcard sized main board with surface mount, an early adopter). The TV lasted years and so when it came time to buy flat-screen, he bought another Sharp. It was made by Vestel.
A few weeks ago his Indesit washer broke and so he bought a new one...a Sharp. Again made by Vestel.

I remember reading an article online a few months ago about Sharp USA selling one of their american factories to Hisense along with a brand licensing deal. So Sharp-branded products are coming out of a Sharp-built factory both of which are now owned and operated by a Chinese company.

I suppose they're just following the trend.
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 10:00 pm   #6
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

My father bought a Sharp TV about a year ago and had problems with the remote. I was expecting to be able to see the infra red transmissions from it with my camera phone but I couldn't see anything so I thought the remote was faulty. It turns out that Sharp now use RF remotes so they don't have to be pointing at the TV to work.
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Old 13th Apr 2018, 10:00 pm   #7
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

Hi

I always found Sharp products were of a decent quality and caused no problems when servicing. Their VHS VCRs were good and nice to work on. The service back up was good as well. Their 14" portable colour TVs from the 1980's were good/reliable sets. Latterly, there was a digital TV chassis intended for analogue transmissions which I think was not one of their best efforts and wasn't reliable. It used surface mounted components which made things awkward.

Nowadays, a lot of the decent Japanese brands are not what they were.

Regards
Symon.

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Old 13th Apr 2018, 10:50 pm   #8
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I am presently listening to Radio 4 on a Sharp stereo cassette radio that I bought in a charity shop a decade or so ago, the only one I could find that had sockets for external mikes and AC erase rather than the more usual permanent magnet found on cheaper machines. It is the only cassette recorder I have that hasn't needed its drive belt replacing.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 12:13 am   #9
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

It's certainly not just the Sharp brand that has gone to the dogs. I was horrified recently to see the Akai brand on the usual Chinese tat in a branch of Robert Dyas.

I agree that Sharp products of the 80s and 90s were very decent mid market stuff.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 12:47 am   #10
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I can remember when Sharp were considered to be the best makers of affordable reel to reel tape recorders.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 2:15 am   #11
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

This link, although in Japanese, has some pictures of Sharp's early days.
http://www.sharp.co.jp/100th/history/pdf/chapter02.pdf
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 7:06 am   #12
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I generally agree with the comments above. Regarding Sharp's so called hifi offerings of the 70s, they never really cut it in terms of competing with the more 'serious' Japanese brands such as Pioneer, Sansui, Yamaha, Akai, Technics/Panasonic, Sony etc, concentrating as they did more so on the music centre, packaged hifi market as opposed to quality separates. They did try to overcome this with the launch of the so called high end Optonica brand, but certainly in UK, this was not a great success either.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 7:09 am   #13
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

All this is interesting. I wonder if we would be allowed to expand on the dearth of well-known Japanese products? I worked very briefly for JVC and at the time (1994) most of their TV's were coming out of China. I haven't seen JVC for years. What has happened to others like Panasonic, Hitachi and Sanyo for instance and others?
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 7:09 am   #14
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

The Sharp website seems frozen in time at around 2012 and makes no mention of the company’s takeover.

http://www.sharp-world.com

Last edited by dazzlevision; 14th Apr 2018 at 7:33 am. Reason: Add web address.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 8:12 am   #15
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jolly 7 View Post
This link, although in Japanese, has some pictures of Sharp's early days.
http://www.sharp.co.jp/100th/history/pdf/chapter02.pdf
Also available in English, this chapter is titled: "Making a Fresh Start in Osaka - Leading the Age of Radio in Japan"

http://www.sharp-world.com/100th/pdf/chapter02.pdf
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 9:09 am   #16
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

We were Sharp agents in the 70's and 80's and their stuff was quite good. Certainly reliable. However, as Stevehertz says, their attempt to break into the higher-end hifi area with their Optonica range was not successful. To me, it was no better than their standard stuff and the exterior design was cheap and blingy. Not a patch on Technics stuff.
Just off at a tangent, our Sharp Microwave has lasted 25 years without incident.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 9:28 am   #17
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

The Sharp 'big window' CB radios of the late '70s and early '80s were considered one-up on other sets by many round our way at the time. They also made a 'small window' set: 'window' referring to the size of the signal strength meter.
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 9:28 am   #18
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

Was it Sharp who went on to make double-sided PCB's in their VCR's using conductive 'pads' rather than resistors? I seem to recall looking at the schematic for a particular 'solid' part which turned out to be a conductive pad, then looking around the underside of the main PCB it was smothered in conductive pads!

Their TV's & VCR's rarely gave serious grief, my only gripe at the time when customers brought their machine to the shop & the VCR was a cheaper model, missing rewind/fast-forward buttons on the front panel ... and of course, the customer had left the remote behind!

Another VCR of theirs, just before the 'talking' model, would do some funky mechanism shuffle, everytime you switched it on, off, loaded a tape, played a tape & even when ejecting. Presumably to take up any slack in the cassette (loaded or not!), was a bit clunky, ever sooooo slooooooooow, but they were reliable & never left tape hanging out of the cassette.

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Old 14th Apr 2018, 9:40 am   #19
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

I always liked the Sharp pocket computers of the 1980s. The later models often had PEEK and POKE (the Casio ones never did as far as I know), and Sharp sold excellent technical manuals that documented the machine code instruction set (and included circuit diagrams).

Of course they were nowhere near as nice as the HP71B, but then nothing ever was...
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Old 14th Apr 2018, 10:50 am   #20
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Default Re: What has become of Sharp?

Their research lab outside Oxford http://www.sle.sharp.co.uk/sharp/app...web/index.html still seems to be operational. The news banner on the website's home page is pretty tired looking but the jobs page says they're recruiting student researchers for Summer 2018.

Cheers,

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