Sunday December 17, 2006

I'd pretty much made up my mind to enter the world of HD with a Sony 46" XBR2 HDTV based on reviews and the rapidly falling prices quoted both online and in stores. Until, that is, I noticed a user review on Amazon (see the review by miniz) that lead me to a very long thread on AVS Forum about problems with this unit.

It's described as "cloudiness" on the forum. In practice, owners are seeing light patches on their screens when viewing dark material. The problem seems to occur in units that were manufactured after about August of 2006, but not all units. And the effect is not uniformly bad on all affected units. Here's a typical example from the forum:

Many people on the forum have returned their units for refunds or for replacements. Unfortunately, replacements often seem to be as bad or worse. Sony so far has not officially acknowledged the problem, although some customers report that service specialists are starting to admit familiarity with the issue. Note that the problem seems to be in the LCD panel itself, which Sony gets from Samsung so the expectation is that this problem is not limited to Sony products. Bummer. My HD Tivo Series3 arrived last week and I was hoping to get the display issue settled--and thought I had.

You'll need to join the AVS Forum (it's free) to read the discussion thread, which is here.