On or around November of 2009, my father-in-law offered to give me his old TV, a Sony KDS-R60XBR1. It’s a 60″ 1080p display that has the odd characteristic of not being able to actually accept 1080p inputs – but for the price of free plus shipping, little details like that did not matter to me.
The TV is a DLP, which is short for Digital Light Processing, which is short for – you need to replace the bulb every once in a while. When we got the TV, it hadn’t been replaced in some time, so the picture was very dull and the color seemed to be a bit off, most notably tiny bits of yellow staining were occurring in the middle of certain scenes. Eventually, we replaced the bulb – which I purchased new off of ebay, and everything seemed to be hunky-dory.
But wait … there’s more!
Fast-forward to April, during the first round of the NHL playoffs. Traditionally, ice hockey is played on a white sheet of ice, and the Caps wear red, white, and blue – as do les Habitants. With the new bulb, the TV had degraded to a point where, during ice hockey games, both teams appeared to be skating on a lake of pee in pee-soaked jersies. The yellow staining of the picture had gotten worse and worse and worse. Episodes of Lost were ridiculously yellow, as any actor appearing on our TV would seem to have advanced symptoms of jaundice.
Having bought the bulb from ebay, and having done quite a bit of research beforehand, I assumed that we had gotten a counterfeit. Counterfeit bulbs are apparently quite a problem in the DLP aftermarket, and I figured – eh, I’ve been dinged. I ordered a new bulb from Sony directly at about twice the price, and stopped worrying about jaundice because the problem would soon be over.
Only it wasn’t. I put the new bulb in the TV and everything was still very yellow. I took the bulb right back out in order to return it, since the bulb wasn’t the problem. I did some very advanced google searching – “KDS-R60XBR1 yellow” and the first link I got hit with was this one. Apparently, this is a common problem much like the Xbox360’s Red Ring of Death – Sony installed bad color blocks on the televisions, and they fail. Some people thought about banding together for a class action suit against Sony – and Sony offered to just settle with each owner of the TV individually. Father-in-law had no idea, and I don’t blame him – neither did I.
I’d be more upset, but as indicated, Sony is attempting to settle with each owner of the faulty set individually. According to that page, they were offering to replace the faulty color unit for free – that’s all I was seeking.
Because the unit was so old, they instead decided to offer us a “significant discount” on another Sony TV. About then was when I figured we’d have to buy a new TV – Sony usually has pricier models, or I figured they’d be trying to get rid of some cruft models they had piling up. Instead, I was surprised, they offered us their top of the line 52″ Bravia for $300, a 55″ Bravia for $200, or another smaller TV I didn’t even consider, for $100. Oh, and we have to promise to not sue.
As far as I can tell, the difference between the 52″ and 55″ were, well, three inches (giggity) and the fact that the 52″ had a bunch of stuff we didn’t care about, such as ambient light and network capability. So we’re going with the 55″.
In conclusion, we’re going from a 60″ 1080p DLP TV with no actual ability to receive 1080p signal from say, our network-enabled blu-ray player, and looks like this:
Which makes Owen and daddy:
By the way, that’s just static – Craig commented that it looked like we are showing a picture of grass. Also, those menus are supposed to be gray.
To a 55″, 1080p, 120Hz LCD – much better than the faux 1080p TV, and at a very good price.
Our upgrade path is crazy, since the significant portion of TVs in our house are from my father-in-law. He gave us the 50″ 4:3 480p capable HDTV built in 1998 first, then jaundice-vision, and is now indirectly responsible for us getting our next TV – again at significant savings. Neat.
