Gee, Kitz, that's bad
I do suspect there'll be plenty more examples of this to follow, however. The industry body responsible for setting standards for set makers in the uk is the Digital TV Group (dtg.org.uk). The information is published in the so-called 'D-Book', but the contents of D-Book are a closely guarded secret not available to the general public.
Earlier in the year I had to investigate a fault in one of my own TV items (I had to investigate it myself because Sony refused to). In that case, it turned out that the D-Book was vague, and the setmakers had interpreted it one way, the broadcaster another. The broadcaster eventually agreed to change so 'all was OK'.
..Except all wasn't OK at all. The point that everybody failed to appreciate was that the D-Book seems to have been written with a total lack of thought of forwards-compatibility. For example, if a comms protocol has a few unused bits somewhere, the standards committee will usually specify these bits 'must be set to zero' by the sender, and they 'must be ignored' by the received. That allows said bits to be assigned some purpose in future, without breaking existing equipment. D-Book has none of that. In my case, 'spare' bits were being set by the broadcaster, in a field that governs the picture aspect ratio. If Sony had ignored these bits, as many sets did, all would have been well but. Instead, Sony placed their own interpretation of the spare bits, causing it to display pictures in the wrong aspect ratio..
Since DTG don't specify that spare bits MUST be ignored, Sony can wash their hands and say 'no bug in our set'. But if DTG ever decide to use these bits then certain Sony equipment, still on sale today, will be dead in the water. A few other manufacturers are implicated too.
I only got to see a few pages of the D-Book (bootleg copies from a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend), but the slap-dash design approach I saw in these pages absolutely horrified me.
