Nearly everyone has upgraded to an LCD or Plasma TV since the big digital television switchover. Many of us are now experiencing how these very expensive sets fail. After having two models fail in three years, I want to share what I’ve learned, so others can try to avoid the same pitfalls.
Admittedly, our household is a good life test experiment. The TV is on over 18 hours a day, since my wife likes to fall asleep in front of it and wake up with it still playing.
At that rate, you have over 10,000 hours on a set in about a year and a half! Here are three common longterm failure modes of LCD TVs:
1. Lines down the sides where standard definition programs have their pictures cropped- If you play a mixture of standard def programs mixed with high def programs, you notice after a while that there is a burn line vertically down the screen on each side, inset a few inches, where the black bars on each side ended that flanked the picture.
You don’t notice until you switch back to the high def program and there are those annoying lines. In extreme cases the high def information in those far left and right areas is uniformly dimmer than the center of the picture. I have two sets with this issue, both with about 15,000 hours on them.
How to avoid this: Either watch standard def in zoom mode (but then some of the top and bottom of the image is cut off), or stretched mode (wide faces) or always try to stay on the high def channels.
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