Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Sony posted this on 1/12

"

The Sony BRAVIA line of flat-panel LCD televisions reflects our commitment to the highest picture quality standards. The KDL-40XBR2/3 and KDL-46XBR2/3 series televisions have received exceptionally high ratings for picture performance from many well respected home theater sources, including the Editor’s Choice Award from CNET™ and critics at Sound & Vision Magazine.

To achieve this high level of performance and picture clarity, Sony utilizes a very bright backlight setting. This helps deliver the brightest picture possible, as well as exceptional picture clarity even in the darkest image sources.

However, the setting, under certain dark viewing conditions, especially blank screens with no video source, may cause the screens on some of these televisions to exhibit slightly uneven uniformity. This condition is not usually visible under typical viewing conditions, such as watching movies or television programming, and generally should not affect your viewing experience.

Should you find that this condition does affect your viewing enjoyment; there are a few settings that you can make to minimize this condition:

* Setup Menu --> Light Sensor: ON
* Setup Menu --> Power Saving: Low or High
* Picture Menu --> Reduce the Backlight Level (Factory Setting: 10)

A combination of the above changes may be applied as necessary.

If your television still does not meet with your approval after these setting adjustments, Sony Electronics will provide a Self Service Software Update that will further minimize the condition. Upon request, Sony will ship this update with directions directly to you when it becomes available in mid-February.

All terms of your Sony limited warranty continue to apply. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, and we continue to stand behind our product and our loyal customers.

Please contact Sony at 1-800-222-SONY (7669) for more information."

See the page here.

Perhaps Sony is starting to take note of the issue!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, there is no physical defect (mura) with the panels, but rather, something with the software that displays a picture on the screen. That's really funny. Everyone was all spun up about a physical (mura) defect with their LCD panel, but it turns out its just a software bug!

Anonymous said...

Um yeah...either that or Sony plans to mess with the settings to hide the defect, at major cost to picture quality.

Peter said...

This is a hardware defect that Sony is apparently trying to make less-noticeable by restricting your ability to raise the blacklight level.

At least that's what most assume at this point. When people start patching their tvs we'll see if it actually has an effect. If it's a hardware issue nothing will be fixed. The clouds will remain. It's unlikely it's a software issue or else these clouds would show even on a bright colored screen.