Doesn't Usually Leave Reviews

A piece of fiction about one small glitch.

★★★☆☆ Great picture and sound, easy to use, some issues

Bought this set as an upgrade on our old TV that was almost ten years old, wanted something bigger with better connectivity. First impressions were good – it was easy to set up and the stand feels nice and stable. I would have liked more than three HDMi ports but solved that with a cheap input splitter.

However I encountered problems watching TV through the aerial, which I usually only do with live sport or news. Sometimes I’d tune to a particular channel and the EPG data would confirm that eg the World Snooker Championship was supposed to be on that channel at that time. But instead the TV would show what seemed to be CCTV of a prisoner in a featureless cell, sitting impassively and staring at the wall. I tried changing the channel and then changing it back, and I also tried turning the set off and on again. I got around it by streaming the channel I wanted via the built-in apps, which work very well.

The same thing has happened again, at different times and on different Freeview channels. The footage seems to be the same person in the same cell, sometimes staring at the wall, sometimes standing up and walking around, or sleeping. I contacted the manufacturer and their customer support person told me to do a factory reset because it might be a security issue, that someone had got into the TV’s settings and could override our own operation of the TV. I explained it didn’t seem like that was the issue, and I’d already done a factory reset anyway, but they told me my only other option was to send it to them for repair and they couldn’t say how long they’d need to have it for, which I didn’t fancy doing. They did explain how to turn off motion smoothing though, so it was worth getting in touch.

I’ve tried looking for clues in the footage that might tell me where it’s coming from or who’s in it, but no good so far. If I knew where it was coming from I might know if it’s something I ought to do something about. As it is I don’t even know if it’s real. It’s easy to fake things these days. Sometimes there’s just a picture of the empty cell and you can hear someone crying out in pain, maybe in an adjacent room. As you can imagine it’s not something you want to randomly come on when you turn over to Cbeebies for the kids.

I don’t want to be too harsh in this review as I don’t know if it’s a problem in all sets or just a glitch with this one. I should probably have sent it back before the 30-day warranty was up but I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I am very impressed with the picture and sound quality at this price point so if you can get a set that doesn’t do the random prison CCTV thing, I do recommend it.