Be Excellent To Each Other

Whilst watching the France game, a horizontal line and a vertical line of what looks like dead or stuck pixels have appeared. It forms a cross on the entire screen. Is it fucked? Only had it about nine months or so. Samsung LED 40" jobby.

http://i.imgur.com/qdDpq.jpg

That's where the two lines meet, but they cover the width and height of the entire screen.

Could it be a result of the electrical storm we've had this evening?

Edit: Also, the part of the screen above the horizontal line is occasionally flickering.

It's fucked, it'll still be under warranty though at that age, so get it swapped sooner rather than later.

Yeah bought it in September from Richer Sounds. Just dug the receipt out. Anyone ever dealt with them and faulty gear? I haven't got the box anymore and the store is in the pissing centre of York. Carrying it to the car in the box was tough enough! Are they likely to pick it up or am I expecting too much? Obviously I'll ring them in the morning.

Now admittedly we're going back about six years here, but I bought I massive pair of floor standing speakers off them (reduced hugely to about £300 IIRC). One of the mid-range cones on one of them developed a 'flutter' a few months in so I emailed them to report it as faulty.

Courier turned up a couple of days later and took them away, courier delivered a brand new set a couple of days after that - all at no charge to me. (And all to and from the IOM!)

Dunno if they're still as awesome as that though.

That's promising! Cheers! I don't think Samsung make the telly anymore though because it's one or two generations old. Maybe I'll get a newer one?

That's what happened to my Acer monitor. Then, when I had a peek inside it turned out the LCD was leaking in one corner and it had gone all rusty

It has had a couple of dark patches in the screen for about 6 months but I've been living with it. Is that a symptom as well? They're only really visible when certain blocks of colours are displayed and the camera is panning. Looks like a patch of dust on the screen. At least that'll be gone as well if I get a new screen!

Was really impressed with Samsung after my last telly, but this one is obviously dodgy.

No complaints about service from Richer Sounds from me.

Yeah I'd say so. We have a 42" sammy downstairs and it's not missed a beat in four years.

I cheaped out up here (32" 1080i Sharp for £210) but wouldn't have minded a sammy

Sounds like what happened to Russ's telly when I infected it with my PS3 of doom.

The vertical lines on ours hit the right hand side, and make the players look like they're incandescent.

That's the mothership beaming them up

They're sending an engineer out on Tuesday. Apparently I'll get a loaner telly as well if they take it away. So that's alright I guess!

Engineer now coming this afternoon instead apparently.

So the engineers came last Monday and ordered me a new screen. They came today and fitted the new screen in my living room. All sorted now!

Also, does anyone know if I'm entitled to a year's warranty on the new screen? I don't fancy it breaking again in six months... I'll ask Richer Sounds when they ring me of course.

Seems to have much less backlight bleeding as well now. Will find out when the footy is on next if it still has those annoying watermarks though.

Just replaced ours with a Sony Bravia because the bouncy balls advert and explodey paint flats advert were cool.

How is it?

Did you not get your old one fixed then?

No. The man said it was tainted with PS3 death.

WTB-pretty good so far. Got HD channels built in and funny Internet videos widgets (youtube, iplayer etc). Also, we plugged in my 1TB external drive and it will record programmes for us.

Freeview HD is excellent. Makes all of the SD channels look like shit in comparison though. Particularly noticeable with sports.

Heh, we've got a Bravia as well and the talk of Freeview HD sent me scurrying to Google only to find that ours has had Freeview HD all this time and I never noticed, mostly because we don't watch a lot of 'real' TV to be fair. However Mrs B is going to be very impressed to find out that she can watch Wimbledon in HD! I'm only seeing four HD channels though (BBC One HD, BBC HD, STV HD and Channel 4 HD) should I be seeing more?

And on a sort of related note, if you've got a Bravia TV and newer PS3 you can link them up so that the TV remote controls the PS3. Handy for watching Blu-rays and the like because otherwise you need to keep switching the PS3 pad on to pause and whatnot.

Yeah only four HD channels at present. I believe BBC HD is to become BBC2 HD at some point, although that's pretty much what it is anyway. Also, Channel 5 will get a HD channel before long I believe.

Ah well, at least I'm not missing anything.

I've had a further poke around online and can't see the feature Russ mentions that lets the TV record programmes for you so maybe he's got a newer model than mine. I did notice though that it allegedly plays AVCHD so I'm going to convert an MKV file and run a test of that for a laugh. We always use the PS3 for playback of downloaded HD stuff but it would be nice to know there's a backup should we ever need it given that the Xbox is pretty bollocks for this kind of thing (Convert everything to HD-WMV? Ha, no!).

ETA: Yep, the TV just happily played an HD episode of Black Mirror converted from MKV to AVCHD so that's good to know!

My Samsung plays .mkvs, so that's good. I need a bigger thumb stick though! Or an external HDD.

On occasion I've watched the iPlayer HD channel on my TV and it looks a bit clearer, but I've not been sufficiently impressed to spring an extra tenner a month on sky for it, or buy a seperate HD freeview box. Mind you, it could be my TV, or something or other.

I'm not sure streaming HD is as good as aerial HD. Would have to check though. Is this the iPlayer app on Xbox?

Edit: oh you mean a Smart TV app? I can definitely confirm that aerial HD is better than Samsung's iPlayer app. I'm not sure it even qualifies as HD!

Yes, it is. TV is a philips of some sort, it says 1080i on the XBox channel thing when I turn it on.

I haven't bothered with the Xbox one myself, but I'll test and report back. In my experience though, streaming HD ain't particularly impressive. Not from the terrestrial TV companies anyway. Streaming HD movies on the 360 is usually pretty decent.

Is that the lovefilm app on the xbox? We were having some thoughts about paying for it, but it is fairly rare we've got 2 hours to sit down in front of a film.

That's just telling you what resolution the Xbox dashboard is being pushed to your TV at, it doesn't necessarily mean that any video embedded in that is actually 1080i. And even then it doesn't speak to the actual quality of the video encode which could be variable but still report itself at a certain resolution. The PS3 and Xbox both report themselves as 1080p to my TV but very few games actually run at anything about 720p (to my knowledge) so it's not necessarily meaningful.

As for Lovefilm, I've used the PS3 app and their website (but not the Xbox app as I don't have Gold) and the quality of the stream is pretty shite, even the stuff that's supposed to be in HD just isn't very good while the SD stuff is outright awful. We're happy just to rent actual discs from Lovefilm and pretty much ignore the streaming stuff as it's shit. If it was good quality and had more TV it would be different but it's not and it doesn't.

Definitely don't get Lovefilm for streaming! Their selection is awful! I was talking about Zune - renting movies one at a time.

But anyway! The difference between Freeview SD and HD is night and day. The SD image quality is frankly horrendous in comparison!

Although it's still a bit variable, the BBC SD channels don't make you want to tear your eyes out but fucking STV (aka ITV) is terrible. It was never that noticeable on old CRT TVs but on a decent sized flatscreen some of the channels are lousy with artifacts.

Yeah you're right. Some channels are laughably bad, some better.

Bamba. Plug in a USB stick or drive into the rec hdd USB port. It will walk you through it by popping instructions for which menus you need in the screen. You have to go to guide, select a program and record it from there after you've set up the external hard drive

I don't know which model you have, but does your remote have a record button? That would be a good indicator.

Wait... My Samsung remote has a record button. I wonder if mine does it!

Nope. Stupid standard remote.

I've just had a poke around and the option you seemingly need to actually configure the USB source for recording doesn't even exist on our TV so presumably it's just too old. It's a KDL37EX403U and was originally available on Amazon in March 2010 so it's definitely an older model.

On a further HD tip, I was just looking at the various Freeview HD channels again there and while the two BBC channels look absolutely fucking gorgeous the ITV and Channel 4 channels really aren't that impressive. Good old BBC.

It depends what's on though! For example, ITV news isn't in HD but Coronation Street looks as good as anything the BBC put out, etc.

Channel 4 News is HD in the studio but a lot of reports are upscaled SD. Adverts are all over the shop. Lots of variables!

At least you have a remote, Chloe managed to knock our TiVo one into Joans' juice at the weekend. Virgin are sending a new one out...

I get snobbish about HD - I just can't/won't watch football on SD these days for example, as it just looks awful in blur-o-vision on my lovely Samsung telly. I'll watch or record everything in HD as much as possible.

I actually disregard any channel that doesn't have an HD equivalent these days. They no longer exist in my mind.

I can still watch DVDs though.

Football in particular is improved by HD. In the last days of analogue, football looked excellent on ITV or the Beeb and I always, given the choice, watched it on analogue in preference to Freeview. There's something about the compression used on DVB-T that makes football (and other pitch-based sports) look pretty ropey.

Behave you!

DVDs look better than many SD TV channels, just as BluRays look better than HD TV channels. 'SD' and 'HD' is more of a sliding scale than two discrete buckets.

I have never watched anything in HD except in very small instances in Dixons or somesuch.