Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Green Glob Gone! (sorta.)

As you may have read, my sony TV has had a big greenish yellow pee stain covering one side of the screen for a while. I learned that this was due to a poorly manufactured "Optical Block" or "OB". and that Sony would replace this part due to a class action lawsuit settlement.

I have been hesitant to take action till I absolutely HAD to because I was not sure a replaced OB will be any better at this time. You see, I know a small bit about how manufacturers deal with “refurbished” parts… and to be honest I was hoping to wait for the supply of bad ones to quit cycling through the system.

Well, In the last few days my set became unwatchable… it had gotten much worse than those pictures and was getting noticeably more discolored day by day. So I called Sony.

I was polite but confident, explained the problem and the testing I had done. They pretty quickly generated a problem ticket and gave me repair centers to call. Pretty easy really. I called all 3 numbers they gave me and picked the one I felt understood the issue best and was most straight forward about it and set up the repair with them.
The tech called this morning saying that they recived the OB and wanting to come out so we set it up…

I now have a second bad OB.

The tech was great, a real nice guy. We talked quite a bit as it takes a while to disassemble the XBR1. I was very confident that things would all be made right. But after he finished and we flipped on the power, I put up my 50% gray test screen and sure enough it was pinkish gray on one side and greenish gray on the other.

It’s subtle, like something a color minded person like me would see but a bench tech refurbishing 50 OBs a day wold blow off. But I know its the start of the “stain”. My tech also saw the issue and offered to order me a new OB… but for the reasons I stated above, I told him I wanted to wait and see if it “goes away”. I of course know it won’t but maybe in a month I may have a better chance of getting an OB that isn’t cursed from the beginning.

Don’t be like me though… replace your OB often! Don’t make your friends and family suffer the green stain! : )

1 comment:

Katy said...

You have got to be kidding me! They replaced it and it STILL has the problem?!! I guess that means you got a "refurbished" one, which was probably just a bad one they took out from someone else's TV, blew the dust off of it, and hoped that you simply wouldn't notice. Argh.

I guess your plan to wait is good... assuming they run out of bad ones and aren't simply just trading bad ones back and forth between customers :)