[WildCard]

I wish I'd known about this forum before shelling out for my new TV. I've bought a Panasonic TX32PL1 tele and it's showing the common problem of dirty patches on the picture. These patches only tend to show up on panning shots of reasonably bright backgrounds but once you've seen them they are there forever!!

Fortunately I don't seem to have some of the problems mentioned. No inch wide brighter lines near the edges and in the centre - the picture does get a little darker as you get to the edges but that's probably due to the tube not being flat on the inside, hence more glass for the light to go through at the edges. No interference on RGB (not now I've chopped pin 19 on the scart anyway). Geometry is pretty good. However, these slightly darker dirty patches are pretty annoying.

Before I go to the trouble of sending the TV back are these dirty patches common to many brands of TV or is just the Panansonic. I might swap it for a JVC 32WFT1 assuming Empire Direct will let me - does this have the same problem?

Has anyone kept a PL1 for more than a few days? Do the dirty patches go away as the tube burns in or do they get worse? I've heard one chap say they did go away after a few weeks use.

Thanks for any info.

Darren.

Darren,

I had a panny pl36 and it has dark patches on the edges of the screen. When watching footie it looks like a stripe. If you look at the edge of the screen when the tv is off you will see that the pixels in the screen are different here and its a design in panny screens. I now have a rp panny and it too has the dark stripes in the same places as the crt tv. it is somthing i can live with as its not as noticable in the rp set. Going by other brands problems i think this problem is very minor so i decided to stick with it. hope this helps.

shaun

I had the Panny 28PL1 and had the dirty patches as well.
Also very recently the picture has started shaking - very strange indeed. Had the interference through any Scart - RGB, S-video or composite and even tried a friends scart lead (cost him £80 ) and still had the interference and i'm sure pin 19 was disconnected.
Had to really drill it into Debenhams to get them to swap it for another tele but I think they saw the light when I asked them for a Loewe Xelos 32" instead. As soon as I mentioned this was what I wanted to replace it with they got more apologetic
The service company were about as helpful as a turd when I reported these problems and the engineer couldn't do a thing about it apart from offer to wave his magic degaussing wand - that'll fix convergence issues etc etc won't it
I had the TV for about 5 weeks by the way and Debenhams were very difficult to deal with, I didn't know about their 28 day refund policy thing either until after the 28 days were up of course. although we told the store during that time we had problems they just said we need an engineer to look at it even though I knew they wouldn't be able to fix it. We moved house during all this as well so it was a really hassle and I didn't need it at the time. But as I said they agreed to a swap in the end so it ended ok I just hope the Loewe doesn't have any problems. It took enough persuading my girlfriend we needed to spend another £400 on top of the price of the PL1

[John Jennings]

I get the colour patches on my Philips PW6006 occasionally. Keeping the contrast and brightness down to reasonable levels does reduce the frequency of their appearances, but an all-white screen for more than 10 seconds will cause them to raise their ugly head.

I've a friend with a Toshiba who gets them very often though, far more than I do.

Seems to be a fairly common occurence on many widescreens

[Nyquil Driver]

The PL1 I owned had two yellowy/brown patches on the screen, but it didn't have them to begin with. I actually heard them being "caused" by prolonged viewing of a bright-white screen.

It happened on the opening menu of my Bush set-top-box (which is an all-white screen with black text). I had the screen in the full Widescreen mode and I had 'AI' switched on, the contrast was set quite high aswell. It was fine for a minute or two, but then I heard a subtle cracking sound and was shocked to see small blobs gradually appearing at the edges. I quickly changed channels and switched through some screen modes (which, needless to say, made no difference) and they were ever-present from then on.

The instructions actually refer to this possibility and advise owners to keep the contrast low with certain material (STB's in particular), sadly it doesn't say how to get rid of the stains in the long-term (I've heard it requires magnets and an experienced technician). At that time, it was probably the 100th problem I'd encountered with the Panny, so it was of no real consequence in my case (I'd already decided to get rid of it anyway).

[John Jennings]

In my case, just switching off the telly for a few minutes at the mains gets rid of the problem. In minor cases, just flicking through the AV channels will clear it up also. I've yet to encounter any permanent burning.

In most cases of colour staining on widescreens it's not actually burn, rather it's just the CRT unable to maintain colour purity at screen edges on bright images for long periods.

[Nyquil Driver]

It was certainly permanent on the PL1 I had because I tried the 'un-plugging from the mains' trick, but it didn't make any difference (I thought the set's own de-gauzing might sort it out). The winter olympics was on at the time, so (as you can imagine) the stains were very hard to ignore. I'd watched a fair bit of snow-bound action before the STB incident and they defintely weren't there then.

Maybe the PL1 is especially prone to this problem?. The instructions very pointedly warn of possible high-contrast damage and the passage is written in a very dis-claiming tone.