One of the unfortunate and low points from the CES 2013 Sony press conference came during the unveiling of Sony’s 4K OLED television. Presented by the 8-month-old CEO, Kaz Hirai, the 56-inch OLED TV was touted as a one-of-a-kind television. While competitors only showed a similar device in concept form, Sony had a finished and working model, something they wished to brag about. Soon after Kaz would finish his announcement of the OLED television and the crew began to roll the TV which was placed on a cart onto the stage, the crowd and CEO took note of the black screen with no content, which seemed to indicate issues with the unit. While the young CEO played it cool and continued to go on with his keynote, the crew began to work frantically on getting an image to appear on the OLED TV which moments ago had displayed a dazzling image. Kaz would eventually finish his keynote address without the OLED television ever working properly. The unwelcome situation has now turned into a embarrassing moment for Sony and many journalists and attendees have written off the event as a blunder for Sony. However, as it was much apparent to those with keen eyes, the troubles did not actually lie with the TV.

Despite the fact that the time between the rollout of the Sony 4k OLED onto the stage and its downfall lasted mere seconds, it’s still an easy event to piece together and see where the failures derived from. While being carted to the stage, the OLED screen did have a working image which soon was replaced by a black screen. With a long cord extending to the side doors by the stage where the video was being fed from, my first assumption was that someone had simply tripped on the wire which fed the 4K video. However, as Kaz would continue with his presentation and the tech crew worked on the TV, different images would come and go, including the dreaded blue screen of death, indicating a feed from a Windows PC. The unseen and connected computer would eventually be rebooted, load into the BIOS screen, and not boot up for the remainder of the keynote, leaving the 4K OLED TV with no image.

As luck would have it, once the presentation was over and Kaz was offstage, the tech team was able to restore a 4K video feed to the 56-inch OLED TV. It’s unclear if the computer was eventually brought to a working state or if Sony had available 4K content from another source. In the end, unfortunately for Sony, despite the problem being caused by Microsoft/Windows and the blue screen of death which has plagued PC users for years, they seem to have unjustly received the majority of the blame. Of course, it’s a bit baffling that there were not multiple PCs ready to help with such a scenario, something which Sony should have done. Still, the headline from this event shouldn’t be Sony’s blunder but the reliability — or lack thereof — of Windows.

Discuss:

Do you think the incident has unfairly caused a black eye for Sony?