Since I haven’t heard for a week on what the story is with my TV, I
called the warranty company to find out.
I ended up speaking with Dolores, a very nice lady who was probably the
most helpful person I’ve talked to yet in this ordeal.
Apparently, the warranty company hasn’t heard anything from the TV
repair shop confirming that the set is unfixable. Dolores submitted a
request for a status update from the “authorizations department” and I
should be getting a call back by Friday. If I don’t hear from them, I
should call them to find out what’s what.
I inquired about the whole process, and here’s what I understand it to
be:
If there’s something wrong with your warranty-covered appliance, they
first try to repair the unit. If the cost of repair will be greater than
85% of the cost of a new unit, they first do a bunch of research to see
if they can get the parts and such at a lower cost and bring it to under
85% of the new unit cost. Failing that, they move to
“buyout/replacement.” At this stage, they have a week to evaluate
whether they can find a “comparable unit” to replace the broken item
with. If they can, you get a replacement item. If they can’t, they
refund your purchase price with applicable sales tax, excluding the cost
of the extended warranty proper.
So: repair, replace, refund. That, as Dolores’s Great Uncle Enoch would
say, is “the whole schtick.”
We’re in buyout/replacement phase, so I should already have heard back.
Something has slipped through the cracks, so we’re nudging the
authorization department to get them going on this.
In all honesty, I’m hoping for the refund. I’ve been researching TVs
like mad lately. I joined Consumer
Reports online to see what they say
about TVs, I’ve been reading the AV Science
Forum to see what other owners have to
say…
I’ve pretty much settled on LCD-based technology. I don’t fancy the
screen burn-in that plasma can provide when gaming, and the DLP “rainbow
effect” has turned me off of that. I’d go with LCoS, but it’s so
expensive there’s no way. So, LCD. I considered a direct-view LCD, but
the most I can afford would be like a 32” one, which is too small. So
I’m in LCD rear projection land.
Looking at those sets, I’m liking the Sony series. The existing owners
seem pretty happy, and I do have a certain brand-affinity for Sony.
Aside from this TV issue of late, they’ve never let me down, and I’m
hesitant to really blame Sony for this one - it’s a technology issue
common to sets that size, not limited to Sony. The leading sets right
now are the
KDF-55XS955
and the
KDF-60XS955,
55” and 60” sets, respectively. The Live Color feature on the XS series
sets seems to be a make-it-or-break-it feature for many of the existing
owners, and the ability to do gamma correction and whatnot in the user
menus (that is, without having to wade through the service tech menus)
is a big plus.
I’ve never been a fan of the whole rear projection thing, but I’ve seen
these in the stores and they’re pretty nice. It’s unfortunate that
there’s really only one [very expensive] LCD set on the market that does
a full 1080 resolution natively (without scaling down), but I don’t have
the $13K to drop on that right now. These sets are, if I recall
correctly, 1386 x 788, so the 1080 hi-def images get scaled down, but
the rest actually have to get slightly scaled up.
