I bought a Sony FWD-55A9G from pro.sony on 4 March 2020 for £1,366.67. It was their Master Series — their flagship professional OLED, certified refurbished, sold directly by Sony Europe B.V. through their own storefront. Paid online.

It had dead pixels.

The replacements

Two days after delivery I was already on the phone to PrimeSupport. By August 2020 the dead pixels were joined by random crashes and hard resets. Sony began sending replacements.

The first replacement arrived in October 2020. Different model number on the label — KD-55AG9 instead of FWD-55A9G — but Sony confirmed it was the same panel, different SKU. It had a dent in the glass. Replacement number two arrived in December 2020 with four dead pixels across the panel. I told Sony this was the fourth defective unit. Employee A escalated to the factory.

By January 2021 I’d received a fifth unit. Also dead pixels. The previous four faulty units had sequential serial numbers. Sony’s own engineer told me he’d escalated to the Product Manager because three consecutive replacements had the same issue. In April 2021, Sony arranged for a courier to collect five faulty units from my house in one go. Five televisions, boxed and stacked, collected over multiple visits. Employee B at PrimeSupport confirmed the collection of all five faulty units.

I think I have a photo somewhere of my living room with about ten grand’s worth of faulty Sony OLEDs stacked against the wall.

I kept one unit and used it for about two years. Then the pixels started dying again. To be fair they probably died a lot sooner than that but I misplaced my magnifying glass.

In January 2023, I contacted PrimeSupport again. They triaged me to Elite Support. I told them this was approximately the tenth TV I’d received of this model. Employee C booked another exchange. The replacement arrived on 13 January and was worse — dead pixels plus entire lines of dead blue pixels. A second exchange was booked. That replacement arrived on 14 March. The driver swore at me and made threats of violence in my home. Sony’s internal note records part of what happened: “One of the engineers was rude to the CST, He insulted the CST and stormed of the house.” That unit also had dead pixels.

On 21 March 2023, Employee C offered me an upgrade to the XR-55A90J — a different model entirely — “to avoid any further inconveniences.” The A9G was done. They couldn’t keep sending the same broken TV. I accepted.

The A90J arrived in late March. I reported dead pixels on 5 April. Employee C escalated to the engineering team. Their engineers concluded the panel was “within tolerance.” Case closed.

Within tolerance

Sony’s own internal CRO notes — obtained through a Subject Access Request — contain this line from April 2023:

No Guarantee a fifth replacement will be pixel free as this is related to the tecnology itself.

Sony would not guarantee that another replacement would be pixel-free. The typo is theirs.

The ISO 13406-2 standard defines pixel defect classes. Class II — the consumer standard — allows a maximum of 2 dead pixels per million. A 4K panel has approximately 8.3 million pixels, giving a Class II tolerance of roughly 16 dead pixels. When I bought it, Sony sold the A9G as an ISO 13406-2 Class I professional display — zero tolerance for dead pixels of any description. Sony’s engineer later told me the displays were “considered within specification” and asked me to speak to my account manager.

By November 2025, the A90J had over 100 dead pixels concentrated on the left side of the screen alone, with further dead pixels around all edges. Six times the Class II consumer tolerance, on a panel that was supposed to be a remedy for a product that was already failing the professional standard.

Sony says they’re not the retailer

I reopened the case on 24 November 2025 with a formal notice to multiple Sony departments. On 26 November, Employee D from Elite Support responded. Her position: Sony is the manufacturer, not the retailer, and therefore not liable under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

I bought the TV from pro.sony — operated, fulfilled, and payment-processed by Sony Europe B.V. A Wayback Machine archive of the pro.sony storefront from May 2020 reads: “Buy directly from us,” “Sony Quality Assured,” “renovated to factory standard through rigorous assessments, testing and serviced to an excellent standard.” Sony Europe B.V. was the retailer.

On 15 December 2025, Sony issued what they called a final decision — case closed, no further support, and a suggestion to contact a repair centre for a paid quote.

I rejected it. I told them I considered the case to be in legal deadlock and that I would be issuing a Letter Before Claim.

Then my dad died, and I had other things to deal with.

The legal case

I got round to it in February. I had Claude draft the Letter Before Claim. Every factual claim was cross-referenced against my email inbox — dates, serial numbers, tracking numbers, quotes. Every Sony admission was cited verbatim with the date and the name of the person who said it. Claude searched my emails, pulled the threading identifiers, mapped case numbers to internal reference IDs, verified the receipt, checked the Wayback Machine archive.

The LBC was sent on Friday 13 February 2026 — by email to three Sony addresses and by tracked post to their registered office at The Heights, Weybridge. I gave them 14 days to respond, with a note that I reserved the right to file proceedings before the deadline if necessary to protect my position on limitation.

The same day, I sent a Subject Access Request under Article 15 UK GDPR. It listed all the case numbers, email threading identifiers, serial numbers, and logistics tracking references I had. Twenty-seven email thread IDs, six case references, seven serial numbers, five courier consignment numbers. An annex cross-referencing each identifier to its parent case. It requested six specific internal escalation records by named staff member and date. Sony’s Data Protection Officer couldn’t plausibly claim they didn’t know what to look for.

Sony acknowledged the LBC on 18 February: “We confirm that we have received it and are currently preparing a response.”

The 14-day deadline expired on 27 February with no substantive response. I filed a claim on Money Claims Online that evening. Claim N6QZ101W. £2,999 — the RRP of the Sony Bravia 9 65”, being the nearest equivalent to the Master Series flagship I’d originally purchased. Sony no longer makes a flagship OLED in 55 inches. The court fee was £115.

On 3 March — four days after I’d filed the court claim and emailed them the claim number — Sony sent their “comprehensive review” of the LBC. It offered nothing. It argued that a refund exceeding the original purchase price would not be “reasonable or proportionate” and that their obligations had been “fully discharged.” It didn’t mention the court claim at all.

The claim was served on 7 March. Sony had 14 days to respond through MCOL… they didn’t.

On 24 March, I applied for default judgment. It was entered on 25 March. Sony Europe B.V. was ordered to pay £3,114 immediately — the £2,999 claim plus the £115 court fee.

On 2 April, Elite Support emailed asking for my bank details. “Please note that we will proceed with a payment of £3114 in order to fully settle with you.” The money arrived on 9 April.

Total outlay was £1,490.92 — £1,366.67 on the TV, £9.25 on tracked postage, £115 on the court fee. Total received: £3,114. The TV with 100+ dead pixels is still in my living room.

Claude

Claude didn’t write a legal argument from first principles. It searched my emails, extracted the relevant facts, and organised them into a coherent narrative — finding the original payment receipt I’d forgotten about, pulling serial numbers from five-year-old PrimeSupport threads, counting characters to fit the MCOL form’s 1,080-character limit and stripping forbidden punctuation because the court system only accepts full stops, commas, and pound signs. It also flagged that the LBC deadline sat close to six years from the original purchase.

It also told me to go to bed about fifteen times. Claude’s system prompt nudges it to terminate long conversations — quality degrades as context fills up. I ignored it.

Small claims

I didn’t realise how easy it was to file a court claim. Money Claim Online looks like it was built in the early 2000s because it was. HMCTS have since launched a new portal built on the GOV.UK Design System — one of the few things the UK public sector has got right with technology.

The issue fee for my £2,999 claim was £115. A defended claim of that size would normally be allocated to the small claims track, where recoverable costs are limited but not impossible. Sony did not defend this one, so it never reached allocation. No judge reviewed the merits. Sony failed to respond, so I was entitled to request default judgment.

A Letter Before Claim is not optional decoration. The pre-action rules expect you to give the other side a reasonable chance to settle before filing. If you skip it, a judge can penalise you. But once a reasonable deadline passes without a proper response, you’re free to file.

Large companies are often terrible at this. The support team doesn’t have authority to settle. Legal doesn’t see the small claims until it’s too late. Nobody joins the dots. The cheapest option for Sony at every stage was to offer me a replacement TV when I first complained in November 2025. Six years of replacements, escalations, engineering reviews and legal correspondence came on top of the £3,114. They ended up with a default judgment because no defence was filed.

Sony paid within fifteen days of judgment, so it need not remain on the public register for six years. I have not checked whether it appears there.

The TV still works. I just don’t look too closely.

For what it’s worth, Sony’s support engineers were genuinely helpful — especially early on. Employee A at PrimeSupport was friendly, patient, and clearly tried to get the problem sorted. Employee C at Elite Support booked exchanges without dragging his feet. The individual support agents did their jobs. The defective product and the corporate structure above them couldn’t be fixed by friendly emails.

Sony make great TVs. They don’t manufacture the panels, but their image processing is genuinely best in class. The OS means ads on the home screen, which isn’t Sony’s fault. I’d buy another one. I’d just keep the receipts… again.

It was never about the money. Don’t call it within tolerance if you won’t say what the tolerance is.

I’m still waiting on the full Subject Access Request response from Sony.