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Sony Recants on Dead Pixels (Sort Of)
Ayaress writes "As reported on Gamestop, Sony will now warranty PSP units suffering from dead pixels. Sony still insists that dead pixels are a common problem in all LCD displays, saying "A very small number of dark pixels or continuously lit pixels is normal for LCD screens, and is not a sign of a malfunction," and asks that PSP owners use theirs for at least a week or two, to see if it still bothers them. User who encounter, "persistent and aggravating dead pixels," are instructed to contact Sony customer support, and will be allowed to mail in their PSP to recieve a unit with a new screen."
I unit with a new screen does not neccesarily mean a new unit.
The Tools Of Ignorance wanna be a tool?
I love it. How are "not functioning pixels" "not a sign of malfunction"?
I've bought well over a dozen LCD montitors from Apple, Dell, and Philips in recent months and I have not seen a single dead pixel on any of them.
This is just a case of Sony reducing cost by widening manufacturing tolerances. It's fine as long as you manage expectations properly.
All of the dollars I spend on my new monitor work just fine, thank you. So guess what... all of the pixels on that monitor had better work just fine, too.
If a manufacturer doesn't consider "a few dead pixels" to be a warrantable issue, then I'm going to make damned sure that the monitor they get back does have a warrantable issue. Applying 120VAC to the 14VDC power jack for a few seconds should do the trick.
My laptop screen is 1440x900px. Of those pixels (1296000) in all, they're all healthy.
Similarly, even the cheaper laptops we get in tend to have fully functional screens to start with.
Sorry guys, but dead pixels are not as common as you might want us to believe. Maybe in a poorly designed portable wherein the manufacturer doesn't care so much about quality, yes... but lately other devices seem to have less pixel-problems.
They're just going to reship the units sent back to them without servicing them, so somebody else will get your dead pixels.
My wife - she works at Futureshop (the Canadian arm of Best Buy) - came home last night to tell me of her hatred for the PSP.
On the opening day, about 17% of the PSPs sold were returned due to defect of some kind. Many of them didn't even turn on.
Yesterday, she had person after person coming into the store complaining about dead pixels. With one guy, she went through an entire crate of PSPs to try and find one that didn't have a dead pixel. No luck. He ended up settling for a PSP that had only one dead pixel - rather than the average 3. One of them had an entire vertical column gone.
From what I'm hearing from my wife, it would be much, much better to wait until revision B before thinking about purchasing a PSP. The ones on the shelves today have far too many defects.
Dead pixels ARE a common problem in all LCD displays. Why is this written like Sony is the only company saying this?
Not really.
Firstly, the common ISO thresholds for dead pixels typically range about 1 to 3 full pixels, and up to 7 subpixels on a typical 17" (1280x1024) display (note: cheaper brands may go with lesser quality panels - BenQ, will allow up to 7 full pixels and 17 subpixels(!) before considering replacement). Going for the worst (3 dead pixels == 9 dead subpixels) - there are 1280x1024x3 subpixels on a 17" panel or 3,932,160. If 9 of them are bad before returns, that's ~0.0000023 dead subpixels, or one dead subpixel for every 436,906 subpixels.
The PSP has a nice 480x270 LCD, or 388,800 subpixels. There should be no dead pixels at all on a screen this small!
In a more anecdotal sense, I remember when color TFTs came out and it was really difficult to get 640x480 screens with zero dead pixels (this was over a decade ago). Fast forward a few years, and the incidence of dead pixels dropped quite significantly, and these days, getting a monitor with dead pixels and laptops with dead pixels tend to be a rarity. It does happen, but rarely (unless you just happen to be really unlucky).
I'm pretty sure people don't complain of dead pixels on PDA screens (QVGA and higher, including oddball 320x320 and Half VGA, to full VGA) - and the incidence of dead pixels on these screens is extremely low.
On screens that are VGA or lower resolution, dead pixels are such a rarity that honestly, it shouldn't be tolerated.
I know it is a common issue in manufacturing. That doesn't mean it should be a common issue in the marketplace.
My AST laptop 10 years ago had zero dead pixels. My IBM laptop after that had no dead pixels either. My Toshiba after that had no dead pixels. And my current Powerbook has no dead pixels. I'll note that cellphone for example has no dead pixels either, nor my Gameboy. Particularly noteworthy, I have not heard the same complaints about Gameboys having dead pixels that people are making about the PSP.
So why do modern LCDs suddenly have this problem, anyway? They always did. The difference is that while they used to throw them away and only sell the good ones, now they are simply saying "Well, we've always had this problem in manufacturing, and we've decided that since we can't fix it, we're just gonna start selling these broken screens and hope you have bad eyesight and don't notice. That way we can skimp on our QA budget and reduce our manufacturing expenses. If you do notice, we'll just throw up our hands in frustration and insist that that's just the way it is."
I did have a Samsung desktop LCD with a dead pixel which they wouldn't replace. It irritated me so much that I gave it to a friend and just pretend that I had accientally flushed the $500 down the toilet or something.
Random and weird software I've written.