Sunday December 17, 2006
Sunday December 17, 2006 Sony 46" XBR2 LCD HDTV: Fatal Flaw?
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.
(2006-12-17 12:50:58.0) Permalink Comments [2]
Trackback URL: http://blogs.sun.com/simons/entry/sony_46_xbr2_lcd_hdtv
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Personally, to watch movies, I'm more tempted by an LCD or DLP projector, but I'm cheap (and ignorant (and I don't own a TV)).
More Preview griping (and even more off topic): every time I preview, I have to answer a simple math question (math is hard!), and check the "Remember Information" (oh irony!) and "Notify me by email" checkboxes. What blog software does Sun use? Perhaps there's an easy fix.
Posted by Kai Carver on December 18, 2006 at 06:45 AM EST #
You are right--HD is about the world of TV catching up to a world computer displays have been living in for some time. A nice side effect though will be the emergence of HD DVDs, which will make the movie experience better for computer geeks as well.
Projectors are the way to go for huge displays for sure. But the bulbs are expensive and I don't want to deal with alignment, etc.
Sun uses an open source package called "roller". I don't know what Remember Information is supposed to do.
Maybe we should request more interesting math questions given that we need to answer so many. How about some word problems about trains going in different directions and different rates?
Posted by Josh Simons on December 18, 2006 at 08:14 PM EST #