I've had my 56H80 since early May. The first thing I did after turning it on was to tune it with Video Essentials. The problem, that I noticed immediately, is there seems to be some light bleeding in from the left side of the screen. In other words, when the picture is absolutely black, I see some light bleeding in. In addition, there are vertical lines on the screen - again, mostly noticable on the left part of the screen.

I don't have a digital camera, but I made this graphic to roughly illustrate what I am talking about:



I called Toshiba, who sent out a technician from a local shop (three weeks later!). He looked at the screen for all of five minutes, admitted there was a problem, then started blaming me for watching too much 4:3 mode. Keep in mind at this point I'd only owned the TV less than a month, and have never had it in 4:3 mode since turning it on.

I complained to Toshiba, and they sent a technician from another shop. Another three weeks waiting for an appointment, then he finally showed up. He admitted to seeing the problem and actually pulled the back out and looked inside. His conclusion was that it was either power interference or a problem with my S-Video cord or DVD player (I ruled out the latter because the problem also shows up in cable feeds). Again, he said no way its Toshiba's fault.

Since then, I've bought a Monster PowerCenter HTS-3500 and component video cables (the cable still feeds from S-video). I've moved every electrical item as far from the TV as possible to eliminate the possibility of interference. Despite all these changes, the bleeding is still there.

I've called Toshiba again, and they tell me their senior reps say its not a TV problem, and must be something I've done or my other equipment. AT this point, I can only conclude it IS a TV problem because I've eliminated everything else. I suspect I'm getting the run-around until the warranty expires, and I've written Toshiba a letter basically repeating what's in this post. Any other advice from the forum?

You mean you are seeing kind of dark vertical lines on the left side of the screen only? You've got yourself a case of raster ringing. A good number of projection TVs are afflicted, some worse than others. I have the problem on a 56H80 also and its quite annoying, but I've been told there is nothing that can be done about it.

For more info you can check out the forums at Home Theater Spot and search for raster ringing in the Toshiba forum.

I believe its caused by some kind of electrical problem, but its probably internal to the set.

They aren't really dark lines, more like light bleeding into the screen from the left side. The lines aren't as white as my graphic shows, they are more like lighter-than-normal lines (black becomes grey, blue becomes light blue, red becomes pink, etc.)

If my problem is "raster ringing", I'm amazed that you would just accept it. It bothers me so bad that I can't enjoy a movie anymore. I'm giving them every reasonable opportunity to fix it, but if they can't I'm going to demand a new television or my money refunded.

I had a hour-long phone call today with Toshiba. They continue to fault everything but the television. I'm supposed to get a call from a "senior technician" this week. If that doesn't result in progress toward a fix, I'm going to have my attorney write a letter.

If you read the boards at hometheaterspot, you'll notice many others with the same problem who have gotten nowhere with a solution. I had a service tech come out for a separate problem and showed him the raster ringing problem and he said there was no way to fix it. Most people can't get Toshiba to even acknowledge the problem (just like you) others say they internally refer to it as the 'Jail Bar' problem but don't know how to fix it.

Mitsubishi sets were also commonly affected with it, but Mits finally found a fix for it which involved moving a wire inside the set and putting a ferrite bead on it - meaning that wire was causing some electrical interference inside the set. I'm hoping that Toshiba will eventually admit the problem and provide a similar fix. I agree, its very distracting on dark scenes to the point that it ruins the experience. Does it happen on all inputs for you? Some have said s-video input doesn't exhibit the problem as bad as component inputs - I haven't tried personally but since I have a progressive DVD player I'm not really willing to downgrade back to s-video.

I have tested it in the following configurations, and all have the same problem, and I see little difference between them...

Cable Box thru coaxial cable
Cable Box thru S-Video

VCR thru coaxial cable
VCR thru S-Video
VCR thru composite video

DVD thru S-Video
DVD thru composite video
DVD thru component video

Most of my cables are Accoustic Research Pro Series, but I also tried Radio Shack Gold (component) and Monster Video (S-Video) cables borrowed from a friend. The problem is still there.

BTW, thanks for the tip on hometheaterspot.