Philips Pixel Defect Policy - for plasma displays?

Hello everyone, first post here...

Just bought a Philips 50" PDP (50PF9431D/37) from Costco yesterday and noticed that it has a few defective pixels. This was a surprise to me as I wasn't aware that this happens on plasma displays.

These is one pixel about halfway between dead center and the upper edge in which the green subpixel is actually firing red like its neighbor to the right. The subpixel doesn't appear to be stuck on - it's just the wrong color. The blue subpixel to the left of the funky green one also has a bit of green in it as well.

About 15 rows higher up and a few columns to the right there is an area where a red subpixel takes on a slightly different appearance depending on the viewing angle. This symptom is repeated about 8 rows higher up and about the same number of columns to the left of the main defect I noted above. These two issues appear to be caused by a minor defect in the cover glass itself (but there's nothing wrong on the surface of the glass). In fact I wouldn't have noticed these very minor issues at all if I hadn't seen the miscolored subpixels.

None of the Philips documentation in the box addresses pixel defects. I've found a few "Philips Pixel Defect Policy" PDF documents on the web (not on Philips' web site though), but these all seem to be oriented towards LCD displays. Anyone know what Philips' policy is regarding these types of defects in plasma displays?

I already know that there will be no problem returning this to where I bought it , but I'd rather not bother if there's a good chance that a replacement unit of the same model will have similar issues. Is this a somewhat common issue with PDPs, or with this manufacturer or model?

My understanding is that a stuck-on pixel in a PDP would eventually burn-in and become a stuck-off pixel (although I don't think I really have a stuck-on pixel in this unit); and that this problem would probably not cause any further issues later. Do I understand this correctly? Is this really worth being concerned with at all?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

We saw a 50" Panasonic (TH-50PH9UK I think) at Costco for a few hundred dollars more than this one. But the wife wanted something at least 50"; and we wanted to keep the price as far below two grand as possible (ruling out the Panasonic) and still get something that would handle SD fairly decently as well. I hadn't heard any big complaints about SD upscaling performance on the Philips models (in fact, that appears to be their main selling point). The average customer rating on cnet for our Philips model was also a tad higher than this Panasonic model, and it appears to have a better feature set. But I will only say that our Philips model appeared to be a better deal for us - don't want to get caught up in any "brand wars" here...


Thanks for the tip. I've had several smaller LCD monitors, a few of which I was able to "flex" out some stuck subpixels via gentle pressure to the front surface (fixed one subpixel permanently this way). But I don't see anyway to do a similar trick with the glass surface of a PDP.

Maybe a real DVD HD feed will help (OTA HD didn't seem to change anything). I will be hooking up the component video inputs from our DVR tomorrow and post the results here.

In any event we are quite satisfied with both SD and OTA HD picture quality on this unit. I also find the menu layout to be easy-to-follow, and each menu item includes a short, concise explanation of the feature at the bottom of the screen. I always give usability high marks and this unit deserves it. A single pixel defect that I can't see more than a couple feet from the screen is not a big deal. Just wanted to know if this was common or not in PDPs or in the Philips brand in particular. Sounds like the answer is "no" in both cases, and I am not going to get bent out of shape over this. As long as the wife it OK with it, I will not be needing to lug this thing back to Costco.

Still, I am curious if Philips has a "Zero Defect" warranty for this sort of defect on PDPs, similar to what they now offer on some LCD models. Anyone know?

I promised to reply with my testing of a "real" HD feed on this unit (sorry for being so late on this):

Our only HD source (other than OTA HD, which looks great BTW) is a Philips DVDR615/17 DVD Recorder (no, we're not partial to Philips, this just happened to be the only affordable recorder when we first bought it several years ago). This unit can output in regular interlaced or progressive scan (480p) over component video output. So I popped in a DVD and switched the output to progressive scan and I really can't tell the difference on this Philips display. I guess that speaks to how well the display upscales (or how bad my eyesight is getting? ), or maybe there's not much of a real difference between interlaced and progressive scan at that resolution anyway. In any event, playing several DVDs at 480p did nothing to fix the stuck pixel on this unit (and I didn't really expect it do anything anyway).

One thing that I did notice is that in progressive scan mode I would see occasional flashes of scenes from another part of the movie than what I was currently watching. I've installed the latest firmware on the recorder but I can't seem to do anything to make this problem go away except to stick with interleaved output. This seems to be a defect with the DVD recorder and not the plasma display. I doubt that any buffer in the plasma is big enough to store a stream large enough to account for the disparity in scenes that we see when this happens. In fact, the DVD recorder itself probably doesn't have that large a buffer, so I'm guessing that it's a problem with the DVD drive itself.

Anyway, as far as the stuck pixel is concerned, I purchased this unit for my wife and she doesn't seem to be concerned with the pixel problem. So we've decided that we will be keeping it, and I'm not going to bother contacting Philips to find out if they have a defect policy for plasma screens.

The Costco AMEX bill has arrived and it's time to pay up!

Quoting me:
One thing that I did notice is that in progressive scan mode I would see occasional flashes of scenes from another part of the movie than what I was currently watching. I've installed the latest firmware on the recorder but I can't seem to do anything to make this problem go away except to stick with interleaved output. This seems to be a defect with the DVD recorder and not the plasma display. I doubt that any buffer in the plasma is big enough to store a stream large enough to account for the disparity in scenes that we see when this happens. In fact, the DVD recorder itself probably doesn't have that large a buffer, so I'm guessing that it's a problem with the DVD drive itself.

Sorry for the late reply - didn't get notification of your post...

What I mean is that in progressive scan mode using the AV3 input on the display (which has the only set of component video inputs), the screen would occasionally momentarily flash to another scene on the DVD, in the foreground. We would be watching our movie and all of a sudden the screen would flash to another scene (for a few moments at most) and then playback would immediately resume from where we were previously watching.

This problem didn't seem to be related to any particular DVD, but some DVDs seemed to more affected by it than others, and a few didn't seem to be affected at all. I don't think it's caused by dirty or scratched discs - we take good care to avoid making even surface scratches on our discs, and in all cases they had no visible smudges.

I'm guessing that the variability of the problem has to do with the complexity of the video stream, but I really haven't done any tests on this. Also, if I recall correctly, it seemed that sometimes we were seeing flashes from scenes later in the movie than where we were currently watching(!) This is another indication that it's is probably an issue with the actual drive in the DVD player/recorder. My understanding is that in 480p mode the DVD player is streaming video directly to the player outputs and bypassing the Faroudja filter and other conversion circuitry. It may be that the physical drive is cheap and these problems are just well-supressed by the filters/converters when running in interlaced mode. All conjecture on my part, but it's definitely a strange problem.

Anyway, it's been several months since we turned off the progressive scan output on the DVD player/recorder and we haven't had this problem since. We don't have another progressive scan source to further troubleshoot the issue, e.g. by connecting an HDMI device to a different input on the display. But I'm guessing that if we did do this we wouldn't see the problem.