Well, panny arrived this afternoon (had a snafu with the shipping that caused a day delay). I was supposed to be there to inspect it when it arrived, but 3rd party shipper didn't call ahead of time... luckily my roommate was there and signed for it, however, she didn't inspect for damage... so when I arrived home I went ahead and uncrated and inspected... no problems, glass intact and not scratched.
Went ahead and started to look for screen defects (after playing with things to get oriented and find a white screen... had to settle on the sweeping white bar / screen saver, but whatever it works). Sadly, my TV has two defects.
They are however, odd as far as I can tell. (BTW anyone have a good way to get a white screen without hooking the thing to my PC?)
1) I thought I had a dead sub-pixel (looks to be blue because I can see the green and the red on either side of the black space). But the weird thing is I can see the dead space even when the TV is off (or has no signal). If you look closely at the screen, it has alternating rows of grey (plasma pixels) and black lines (the infamous screen door). Well this particular guy is in the row of grey (obviously) but I can clearly see where there is a missing grey spot- even when the TV is off/unpowered/no signal.
To me this is odd, since I'd think a dead pixel would be indistinguishable from a regular pixel when the system is off?? VA thought that was weird too, never heard of it before.
I was wondering if maybe this is some kind of supposed to be there thing (like the ground wires on a Sony CRT)? It's almost directly in the middle of the TV horizontally and about 1/3 of the way top from the top vertically. Anyone else have something like this??
2) Almost directly below the dead pixel (for lack of a better description) and slightly to the right, in the bottom 1/3 of the screen there is what I'm almost sure is some sort of dirt or particle between the outer screen and the plasma pixels. It obscures the pixels behind it (which light up) and when I look at it from an oblique/low angle (relative to the orientation of the screen) I can clearly see it floating in space. It's not on the screen since I can't clean it off, so I'm pretty sure about it being sandwiched in there somehow. Matt and VA joking suggested it's the blue sub-pixel from above that fell out and ended up there.
I was moderately amused by that thought.
Anyway, I hope to get these issues resolved with a new screen, but again the hassle element rears it's head. But I'd still like to know in my head that I have a perfect screen- especially one that I paid $5k for.
Oh that reminds me, before the set was delivered VA put up an AVS package on their website (which I got with the stand) which would have saved me $100 on my order (this is literally two days after my order and before the TV was delivered). Matt is looking into if they can refund me that $100, which would be sweet on top of getting a new screen. Here's to crossing my fingers on the new one and that they also agree these defects are returnable (pretty much already sure of that after talking with Matt at VA).
Unfortunately I'm going to Japan tomorrow for a week, so I can't talk to the guy at VA that handles quality issues until then. On the plus side, there is 30 days to settle that stuff, so we'll work it out when I get back from Japan.
