Will Sony Warranty Service Include Tweaking? (1 Viewer)

[Brent Hutto]

After a long an torturous road, I've arranged for my new 36XBR800 will arrive at my house tomorrow. Or maybe it will arrive next week instead. And maybe I'll receive the stand for it one day later in this century. At this point, I've quit making predictions. Anyway...

Let's say the TV meets or exceeds all my expectations for picture quality. DVD's look great, it does a passable job on Dish Network and local cable channels, everything is wonderful. Except let's say it has that annoying bowing of horizontal lines that all the XBR's in the store seem to have to one degree or another.

I am disinclined to touch the service menu settings for as long as the TV is in warranty coverage (2 years). If I log a warranty service call and tell the repair person that my TV is "broken" to the extent the letterbox lines are curved is there any chance in the world that person would be willing and able to tweak the service menu settings to minimize the problem?

In other words, how "broken" does the TV have to be to avoid the "looks fine to me" copout? And how familiar are the Sony or Circuit City contractors who fulfill those warranties going to be with the kinds of adjustments that seem common knowledge among the geekier Sony owners? (BTW, no offense intended, I'm geeky myself about some things, just not about TV's).

 

[jeff lam]

Brent,
I'm glad you finally bit the bullet and got the XBR.

I don't know about the service guys fixing the geometry but I'm sure they will replace the set if you aren't happy with it. Maybe you will get lucky and the set will be good out of the box.

 

[Brent Hutto]

I'm sure they would do a replace if needed. I'm more concerned with an "Well, it's OK but..." kind of thing. From the instructions I've seen, if you have a service manual and have any clue what you're doing it's possible to tweak a pretty-good-but-curved image into an almost perfect one.

If the service folks wouldn't do it, I suspect at some point I would go ahead and try it myself. Probably not for the first few months, though. If it was something I couldn't live with for half a year so, I'd probably insist it be replaced if not fixed.