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"  When PM&amp;#039;s editors first hooked up our new PlayStation 3 to our Westinghouse HDTV, we were quite impressed by the beauty of the world&amp;#039;s first 1080p gaming system. But we soon discovered an annoying little technological tic that caused the sound to cut out and the screen to blink on and off when we would launch certain games. Was it the PS3 or the Westinghouse TV? From responses on our site, we realized we weren&amp;#039;t the only ones with this blinking image issue. Many PS3 owners, who had their console connected via an HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) cable to a Westinghouse LCD\u2014ours is the LVM-37w3\u2014reported the same problem. Westinghouse customer support said they knew about the problem and advised using a component cable instead of HDMI\u2014and to call back in a few weeks for a real fix. Unplugging and re-plugging the HDMI cable was our temporary workaround\u2014a decidedly low-tech fix for a high-tech problem. We asked Patrick Seybold, a senior PR manager for Sony Entertainment about the problem. He said he hadn&amp;#039;t heard of any issues with the HDMI connection, but he did suggest we try a video output reset. &amp;quot;That should be the first and foremost attempt at fixing the problem,&amp;quot; Seybold says. The reset\u2014instructions are available on the PS3 troubleshooting page\u2014requires that you turn off the PS3 with the manual switch on the back, turn it on and then hold the front power button down for about five to eight seconds until it beeps twice. Then you re-select the 1080p resolution when prompted. Thanks, Patrick, we tried your fix... but after a couple of rounds of Resistance, we were back to the blinking screen. We then checked with Leslie Chard, president of HDMI Licensing, which owns the rights to the standard, who told us that HDCP is one component of HDMI that has been causing interoperability issues. HDCP (high-bandwidth digital content protection) is designed to prevent the interception of data\u2014specifically copyrighted Hollywood movies\u2014between an output component and a display. As Steve Balough, the president of Digital Content Protection, the licensing company for HDCP explains, the two pieces of hardware must exchange a &amp;quot;key,&amp;quot; a sort of certificate of authenticity unique to each individual device, to verify a secure connection. Dissecting the details of HDMI and HDCP was educational and all, but it still didn&amp;#039;t solve our PS3 problems. We spoke with Westinghouse monitor product manager Klaus Libor, who told us that our 37w3 set may well need an update to the firmware to correct the timing during HDCP authentication. &amp;quot;The PS3 expects a response that the TV is copy-protection ready in a certain amount of time,&amp;quot; Libor says. &amp;quot;And the response wasn&amp;#039;t coming quickly enough.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Customers should call our tech support line, and we can schedule an in-home firmware upgrade,&amp;quot; says Rey Roque, Westinghouse vice president of marketing. He promises it won&amp;#039;t cost you a penny\u2014he didn&amp;#039;t say if he would do it himself. Since the problem was only discovered after the PS3 shipped, if you go to a store today and buy a Westinghouse that has been sitting in a store, Roque admits that it might not have the latest firmware upgrade. But everything in their own warehouse was upgraded, and during CES the company unveiled 2007 models that can be firmware-updated by the owner via a USB flash drive, negating the need for a technician visit.\u2014Emily Masamitsu UPDATE: Westinghouse Reacts "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/gaming/how-to/a1266/4212161/>