Yet more WS woes - Anyone know what causes this ?

[Jimmi]

I have a Samsung WS28M64 TV which works fine apart from one annoying problem. In dark scenes with low contrast a light patch appears down the left side of the screen.

If there is a decent patch of brightness in the scene, the picture is fine. But when there is very little contrast the light patch appears down the far left of the screen and the affected area of the picture goes a little cloudy.

Does anyone know what causes this and if it can be corrected ?.


What makes it worse is that this is in fact my 7th WS set! (of various different brands) and it's for the upstairs bedroom so with each WS TV I've had to lug the bloody thing upstairs only to find that there's something wrong with it and have to lug it back down again!.

My first set was a super market brand which had a problem displaying subtitles correctly. So I swapped it for a Philips 6006 but that had a slanting image and grainy picture, so I swapped it for another 6006 but that had the same issues. I then went for a Sharp 28JW but that had a problem where the the background of the image would erratically flicker whenever the set was in 16:9 mode, so I swapped that for another Sharp 28JW but that too was the same. I then opted for a Panasonic DK1 but that had some of the worse voltage regulation I've seen on a WS set and that resulted in the picture warping whenever the screen was bright - back it went. After that I was so sick with widescreen CRT's that I lost interest in buying one for the best part of a year. Now I've decided to try again and opted for the Samsung 28 pure flat only to discover the previously mentioned white patch issue. I'm really hoping that it's something simple because I don't think I can face the hassle of carrying it back downstairs, boxing it up and sending it back for a replacement only to find that the replacement is just the same after I've lugged it all the way back upstairs again.

Please help!.

 

[fatbob]

Sorry Jimmi, but it sounds very much as though the set you have is faulty, and I can't see any alternative to sending it back.

The problem you describe could be an actual fault with the tv, and a replacement may not suffer from this, or it could be that this cloudy patch is a characteristic of this set (in other words, a design fault) in which case a replacement would have the same problem.

I'm sorry to hear you've had such terrible luck with defective sets, but decent quality control no longer seems to exist where tv manufacture is concerned, and sub standard sets are now all too common. A tv engineer recently told me that when he's working on a tv made in the last three or so years ago, the quality of the components are much poorer than those used in tv's made in the mid to late nineties, and that it's very obvious that compromises are made to keep getting prices down, resulting in the poor quality you have experienced. Even much more expensive sets have their share of problems.

As a last resort, I would try a Sony KV28LS60. It's a bit more expensive at around £450, but would be less likely to have problems.