Hi all,
I purchased a KD49XE9005 from John Lewis back in May 2017.
On taking delivery and setting the TV up (wall mounted) I couldn’t of asked for more, the picture is outstanding, which I was hoping as I based my purchase on a fair few online reviews, and overall I was extremely pleased.
After a few days of fiddling around with picture settings and so on, I had the picture perfect. After a couple of weeks or so after I noticed some vertical banding, mainly on panning, light, shots etc.. It was not too bad if you were sitting directly in front of the set, it gets a lot worse from the side, but never the less there was something not quite right.
I contacted Sony with my query and they were very helpful, I was asked to factory reset the TV, unplug devices etc... which I did and on first look it seemed that this process had worked. This was a little short lived as it did return.
After speaking with Sony again and sending them some images of the issue I was feeling pretty confident that a replacement would be coming my way, unfortunately not, a very helpful customer services representative did call me directly and stated that the set was operating within specification and there was nothing they could do (please note that the member of staff that called me was very polite and apologetic and this isn’t aimed at them personally), this was quite surprising to me.
I also contacted John Lewis regarding the matter, once again very helpful, but all they could offer was to collect the TV and have it sent of for repair. I wasn’t too happy with this option as what with the TV only being weeks old that having it repaired and not replaced at such an early stage isn’t acceptable in my opinion.
I came to terms with the fact that apparently nearly any other set on the market has this issue to a certain degree, and if it were to be replaced or repaired that it may come back worse.
I’d like to mention that this TV is fantastic with regards to picture, 4K is stunning and HD quality is superb plus the sound packs a punch which is unusual for such a thin set.
I think what I’m trying to ask or just get across is that should I just live with this? Am I asking too much to not see any banding at all? For a product, which wasn’t cheap at the time, to have a flaw like this and to be pretty much ignored by the manufacturer is shocking, from researching on the internet about this issue it seems to me that they know full well of the problem but don’t want to acknowledge it.
I love this TV and am overall happy but once you’ve seen the banding it can be difficult to ignore, however if I’m just being a little OCD about this and it’s something that is apparent in lots of other sets then it looks like I’m just going to have to live with it.
It’s worth mentioning that if I turn the set on and the banding is bad, I turn the set off again, wait for ten seconds, turn it back on, then it reduces a little and stays that way for the duration I have the set on for.
I would really appreciate to hear other peoples opinion on this and if there is any advice out there, possibly to remove the banding (I’m guessing that’s not likely but wanted to ask) or otherwise.
Thank you.
