cream of pepperoni
HP tech support is annoying.
My fairly-new plasma TV apparently "performs as expected" when it can't show a mostly-white screen upconverted from composite video to component video by my amp (or Dave's, made by a different manufacturer). A mostly-white screen comes up pretty often -- things blowing up, the intro sequence to Numbers, one of the channel id sequences shown on Showtime, various advertisements.... (What does "performs as expected" mean, anyways? "The signal's way out of spec, so we don't expect the TV to support it"? "Yeah, we know the TV is badly made and can't display that slightly unusual but in-spec signal"?) That's what the tech support people are passing on to me from the engineering guys who supposedly looked into it. Oh, and they add the not-so-helpful observation, "Maybe they're just not compatible."
I've asked them to contact engineering again and get me something more specific. If nothing else, something I could take to Sony to convince them that their amp's conversion circuitry is defective. If I can get that, maybe I'll believe that HP has actually investigated the problem.
The front-line support people really seem to be taken in by the logic, "It works in this other configuration without the amp, therefore the TV's fine." It clearly means the amp configuration is doing something different that the TV has trouble with, and does suggest that the amp is at least part of the problem, but it certainly doesn't prove the TV works fine with all valid input signals, or that the amp has to be the entire source of the problem.
And I'm not even reporting problem #2 to them yet. (For the curious with nothing better to do than read this, the screen blanks out for a moment, maybe a two or three times an hour, if I feed it composite signals directly. I have to check whether S-video had the same problem. So not using the component video for non-component sources may not be a useful workaround for problem #1.)
It would be a pretty nice TV, if it actually worked well.
My fairly-new plasma TV apparently "performs as expected" when it can't show a mostly-white screen upconverted from composite video to component video by my amp (or Dave's, made by a different manufacturer). A mostly-white screen comes up pretty often -- things blowing up, the intro sequence to Numbers, one of the channel id sequences shown on Showtime, various advertisements.... (What does "performs as expected" mean, anyways? "The signal's way out of spec, so we don't expect the TV to support it"? "Yeah, we know the TV is badly made and can't display that slightly unusual but in-spec signal"?) That's what the tech support people are passing on to me from the engineering guys who supposedly looked into it. Oh, and they add the not-so-helpful observation, "Maybe they're just not compatible."
I've asked them to contact engineering again and get me something more specific. If nothing else, something I could take to Sony to convince them that their amp's conversion circuitry is defective. If I can get that, maybe I'll believe that HP has actually investigated the problem.
The front-line support people really seem to be taken in by the logic, "It works in this other configuration without the amp, therefore the TV's fine." It clearly means the amp configuration is doing something different that the TV has trouble with, and does suggest that the amp is at least part of the problem, but it certainly doesn't prove the TV works fine with all valid input signals, or that the amp has to be the entire source of the problem.
And I'm not even reporting problem #2 to them yet. (For the curious with nothing better to do than read this, the screen blanks out for a moment, maybe a two or three times an hour, if I feed it composite signals directly. I have to check whether S-video had the same problem. So not using the component video for non-component sources may not be a useful workaround for problem #1.)
It would be a pretty nice TV, if it actually worked well.