Problems with the Sony 30 Wegas?

I've got Wega 24" and 32" TVs and neither have had any problems since bought new several years ago.

As I recall there were two different classes of Wega TVs. I believe one was a cheaper version (possibly the F or FV series?) I have had only one problem with my 5-year old 32" model and that is with the clock. It runs several minutes fast each month making it basically useless. Seems they did not take advantage of the stable 60 Hertz AC power current for clocking and instead have a cheap free running oscillator instead. Given the price of the set, this seems almost ludicrous.

But, the good news is the picture still seems as bright and sharp as the day we bought it.

Bob

bought

Er, a lot of people actually disconnect power completely from the TV, especially when going on holidays or for whatever reason. It is a pain to have to reset the time every time you switch on again so that method is also next to useless. A battery backed xtal controlled clock would be best a-la your everday PC. Of course, the added cost would probably mean it is unlikely to be adopted for analog sets since these are a dying breed. Hopefully, down the track, digital TV transmissions will all send the time locked to UTC or some other standard.

This paper covers the problem

I have had a 32FX65 for five years and no problems whatsoever.

Jan

-- jankro (@) saunalahti (.) fi Please notice my new address!

"oddvark" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@l41g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...

Would you like the good news or bad news first?

What the heck, here's the bad news: I had to immediately return the first unit I brought home because the timer/clock chip was faulty and the convergence was absolutely horrendous. Edge and corner convergence is generally pretty crummy on WEGAs (or at least was) considering they cost (or did when I got mine) much more than the competitors. The second unit I brought home had much much better convergence throughout, so factory alignment isn't very consistent, either -- even given a generous misconvergence allowance. I'm comfortable making a blanket statement such as this regarding the convergence, as I visited numerous retail stores which had these on display, both in and out of town -- yes, I had too much time on my hands, but I also had other things I needed to go pick up, so... Every last one of the units in the stores, plus the two I brought home, had varying degrees of misconvergence in the edges and corners. All were highly noticeable and I'd go so far as to say unacceptable for Sony. Maybe they've improved with tighter tolerances since I got mine. Before people jump all over me for this, let me say that I've done my fair share of yoke/convergence adjustments over the years and am well aware of the difficulties in obtaining "perfect" (it's in quotes for a reason) corner and edge convergence, particularly with larger CRT's, and especially when rushed to do so (as factory techs would be). But that awareness doesn't make it any less disappointing in a premium product that demands a mucher higher price than its competitors (at that time anyway). I compared the WEGAs side-by-side with other sets and some of the competitors had far better convergence, but the overall pic quality was inferior for other various reasons, which explains why I ended up buying the WEGA anyway. So why am I complaining then?!? Because I (unreasonably perhaps, so what) expect more from Sony. ahh, looking through the flyers, I see WEGAs are downright cheap nowadays compared to 5 years ago, so I'm still annoyed. :P Yeah yeah, I hear you folks.. if I want zero misconvergence, buy a freakin LCD or plasma set! That's a good idea. When can I expect you to cut me a check? ;) Here's another prob an LCD unit would remedy: this WEGA's flyback started squealing about 8 months or so after purchase. That is far too soon in my view, and it's highly annoying. This thing is heavy heavy, so I haven't bothered pulling it from my entertainment center to open it up and dope the FBT and/or check solder joints, etc. It has sufficed thus far to simply tap the cabinet or shut 'er down for a while and power 'er back up and experience blissful FBT silence. Why not take advantage of the warranty then? Well, it's HEAVY.. and frankly, the prob isn't severe enough to be worthy of hauling it 40 miles out of town and damn sure not worth the cost of shipping it. Besides, I don't want to risk getting a unit returned back to me that's in worse shape than what I sent in, or worse a new unit with far worse convergence.

And now, for something completely different (the good news): My 27" WEGA is still going strong after 5 years, requiring no "actual" repairs. While the factory alignment tolerances are annoyingly generous and the flyback transformer prematurely sings, WEGAs are obviously designed to produce a like-new pic way past the warranty period.

was

did

They use a microprocessor anyway, it's virtually trivial to allow the clock to lock onto AC when present and use the crystal oscillator if it's unplugged.

No matter whether the mains frequency was used as a reference or not, and no matter whether a micro is used or not, when mains is disconnected the only way to maintain correct time is by using a battery backed xtal locked clock. However, it doesn't make sense to provide both mains AND xtal locked clocks with automatic selection of either depending upon whether mains is connected or not. Surely, if the xtal controlled clock was included that method would always be used to provide the time since it would have to be running all the time no matter whether mains is connected or not. Just like in PC...

ok, well, thanks everyone for the reply. Ray, thanks for the information. I hope that I dont have the same problems as you do...also, my dad doesn't even know what convergence is, so perhaps he will not be too dissapointed. I believe that overall picture quality is what matters to both of us, so hopefully that will be ok. As long as its not obviously bad.

Anyhow, I hope they have improved things over the last 5 years. The ones I see at Fry's look pretty good. So I guess I'm gonna go for the plunge.. nervous time!

Why doesn't it? I've used that feature on a microprocessor based clock I built, it's just a matter of having code that syncronizes timekeeping to the AC line when present, and if that goes away it uses a timer interrupt driven by the CPU's crystal oscillator. The benefit is rock solid long term timekeeping (better than any crystal oscillator) when power is present combined with backup that's reasonably accurate for short outages with no added hardware other than a resistor and capacitor for the AC sync. I've seen other designs that even autoselect between 50 and 60 Hz, again just coding, no hardware change. Modern microcontrollers tend to have vast amounts of memory for what they typically need, there's usually extra space for cool features like this.

*Many* clock radios and other digital clocks use a very similar arrangement though most of them use a simple R/C oscillator for the battery backup.

The point I was making is that the Sony designers really skimped here in their design. This set cost well over $2K and the clock gains about 3 minutes a month on the cheap oscillator they provided rendering the clock pretty much completely useless. I have a $49 DVD player that synchronizes it's clock from the local PBS so it is always accurate to the minute. I have a $30 alarm clock that functions as James describes below using the AC house current and with a backup oscillator for power loss. It just seems Sony completely missed the boat here to save a dollar. It can't help but make any intelligent consumer wonder where else they cut corners on their top of the line set...

Bob

*Many* clock radios and other digital clocks use a very similar arrangement though most of them use a simple R/C oscillator for the battery backup.