Looking for opinions on Toshiba 36HF73

[overnon]

I am planning to purchase a new Toshiba 36HF73. I know they are a 2003 design but from what I can see they are the biggest bang for the buck. It's the only 36" I can find for under $1,000 and it IMO has excellent PQ even when compare to the Sony HS420 series and even possibly the XS955 series ( now I know this will get some feathers ruffled) but this is what I observed in more than 3 stores in the same day. I am getting Voom installed and have HD and SD OTA and watch an occasional dvd on an RCA DRC-240N. My main question is are there any glaring technical problems with the model. I have seen very little on them in the forum. Only occasional posts for service menu items and possible weak power supplies but little more.

Thanks

[kevindow]

I purchased the same TV from Costco about 4 months ago. When I got it home, I noticed some serious geometry problems on 16x9, with a top and bottom dip in the middle and the top left corner was higher than the top right corner. So I took it to my nearest Toshiba service center, which ordered a new picture tube. When they put the new tube in, some board went bad, so they ordered a new one. When they put the new board in, something bad happened to the new picture tube. So now I am waiting for a new picture tube. We have been without this TV for about 6-8 weeks now, and even my 3 year old is wondering when we will see our TV again. So bottom line, I would not buy one of these TVs unless the 16x9 geometry was just right out of the box. And I would seriously look at the Sony TV you mentioned. Unless this TV is fixed soon, I will joyfully return it to Costco and buy the same Sony.
Kevin

[overnon]

I haven't gotten a chance to put any of them in 16x9 mode yet so I had not run across that. I'll check into it.

I do remember something about this on a 34" Toshiba from a forum member from Canada.

[kevindow]

Final update:

After the local Toshiba service center installed two new picture tubes which had the same geometry problems, I have decided to call it quits and take the TV back to Costco and get my money back. Fortunately, I am dealing with Costco and they will definitely take care of their customers. I will now look at the Sony and JVC 36 inch TVs.
Kevin

[mangombia]

We bought this same monitor (it only displays what I feed it as I don't use the internal NTSC tuner, and it lacks an ATSC HD tuner) last fall and overall, for the price <$1k, we are very pleased. We too purchased it at COSTCO, whose return policy is simply another name for insurance against obsolescence. I have noticed a slight geometry problem in 16x9 mode in that there is a very slight bow in the upper left letterbox area, but it is non-obvious. In fact I had to get a yardstick out to make it apparent when trying to point out the flaw to my father.

One point of caution I should mention: If you are viewing upconverted SD programming in an HD stream you will get black bars around all four sides of the picture, which is known as the postage-stamp effect. The 36HF73 has a zoom mode, however, with respect to HD signals the zoom is disabled, and setting the display to NORMAL will simply stretch the picture up/down, and not left/right, resulting in a distorted image.