Comments on Toshiba 32UL863B

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RonRoyce

10:59 PM on 29 November, 2011

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Electric Sheep;

It is disingenuous to blame one company for a defect that is a general issue for LCD displays and not specific to one manufacturer. Every TV manufacturer will have this issue in their products, and they will most likely deal with it in the same way. It is also completely wrong to suggest that CRT is 'more reliable' as the history of LCD in mass market TV is less than 10 years, so no realistic comparison can be made. If you want to compare then it should be with the data from CRT production in its first 10/20 years, which I would expect would not be favourable to CRT at all.

Though the process of continuous improvement is much accelerated these days it still takes time to reduce or eradicate issues, especially ones that require a radical rethink of material construction or manufacture technique and every display type has its own inherent shortcomings. Plasmas generally do not last much more than 5 years, are known to suffer higher defect rates than CRT or LCD and until relatively recently the purchase cost was high – do you apply the same logic to this display?

LCD technology, although with us for some time as a display on PC's and in other small scale products, has changed massively in a very short space of time. It only became a display of choice for mass market TV in the last decade and it was an expensive option compared to CRT. In those days there were many problems with uniformity, black level, colour fidelity, response time, memory effect and reliability. New technology will always have numerous issues in its infancy as manufacturers develop them, understand the root causes and solve or improve these issues over time. At the time of the 66 series (2006?) the learning curve was still steep for all manufacturers. It was the same for CRT – in the early days it was a horrendously unreliable tech, a situation that lasted for decades with the electronics (live chassis with voltage drop rails was the norm in those days) causing spectacular failures and the tubes themselves rarely lasting more than a few years. It was only through the 1970's after the advent of the Trinitron tube that things changed radically, research and development accelerated and quality/reliability improved to the point that a CRT lasting 5+ years became the norm rather than the exception.

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