Russell Harrison

Optical Block

For the past few months my TV has been having problems with a blue haze bleeding in from the lower right corner. At first it wasn’t really that noticeable but lately its been accompanied by these blue dots slowly appearing all over the screen. They look very much like hot pixels. Obviously this trend isn’t a good one, so today I did a quick search for “KDF-42WE655 blue dots” and was lead to a Web 2.0 site I hadn’t heard of before.

FixYa is a community site that answers your questions about your broken stuff, and tags both the questions an the answers. There has always been a wealth of information and vibrant communities of smart people on various forums for this type of thing but it has always taken me a long time to find the answer I was looking for. It was very refreshing to find that FixYa has a “blue dots” tag! Unfortunately, the problem with my TV sounds like something called an “optical block” which is a $1100 repair! Thankfully (sort of) I’m not the only one having this problem and Sony has extended the warranty for this problem only. Whew! Of course I have to use their service guys, but I really don’t care if it keeps me from having to buy a new TV.