just saw this today...from
http://www.philstar.com/philstar/NEWS200602220711.htm:
Can’t turn them off
And now for some very disturbing news.
If you bought a Sony Bravia LCD or rear-projection screen TV within the past year, you may have a little bit of a problem on your hands. Roughly 400,000 of the TVs which were sold in North America, South America and Asia cannot be turned off or come out of standby mode once they pass 1,200 hours of use.
Japan’s Sony Corp. has just warned that about 400,000 if its Bravia brand liquid crystal display (LCD) and rear-projection TVs launched last year may malfunction due to faulty software.
According to a Sony spokesperson, after 1,200 hours of use, the TVs may not be able to be turned off or switched out of stand-by-mode. The TVs were sold in Japan, the United States, South America, China and other Asian countries.The software for those sets receiving digital or cable broadcasts can be upgraded automatically but Sony must dispatch a person to fix those TVs that are receiving analog signals
The number of TVs affected comes to about 10 percent of the 4.2 million LCD and rear-projection TVs Sony is aiming to sell in the current business year to March. Sony has enjoyed strong sales of its Bravia brand TVs since launching them worldwide late last year, taking market share from LCD rival Sharp Corp. in the United States market during the key year-end holiday season.
Sony has admitted that about 18,000 of these very expensive tv sets it sold in China have a software glitch that makes it difficult to turn the TV on or off. The TV sets in question belong to five models, two of which are rear projection models, manufactured between August and Nov. last year at Sony’s Shanghai factory.
It is now offering free software upgrade to consumers who have bought the models - KF-E42A10, KF-E50A10, KLV-V26A10, KLV-V32A10 and KLV-V40A10. Apparently, Sony discovered the error while running tests on the TV sets. The clock in the software resets itself after 1,200 hours of operation.
Users will have to pull the plug and then plug it back in to get the TV up and running. So far, of the 17,923 affected models sold in China, 12,844 are rear projection TV sets and 5,079 are LCD TV sets. Consumers would have to leave their TVs running for 50 days non-stop before the error occurs. Sony has admitted that the glitch affects the same models sold worldwide.
