[noggin]

I've had an XE9005 and then an XF9005 (the XE was replaced by the XF under warranty as Sony weren't able to fix the confirmed frame drop and frame repeat bug on 50/60fps content in the XE90 series)

Hi, how did you check it?      

I saw the issue within about 5 minutes of switching on my TV for the first time, once I'd disabled all the horrible picture processing (Motion Flow, Noise Reduction, Contrast Enhancement, Reality Creation etc.) as I was watching a music performance on a TV show that had a crawling caption overlaid. The caption kept juddering around shot changes.  When I watched the same content on other displays (i.e. the same show from the same PVR source) there was no juddering.  Once I spotted this issue I saw it on pretty much every 50Hz native show (but not on 25Hz native progressive shows)  I logged an issue with Sony Support online (don't bother doing that - they are dreadful).  Once I had got nowhere online I logged it with the Sony Support telephone team.  They were much better and after a week or two I'd escalated to their 'very difficult problem, talk to someone who can actually help' team...

NB : I had to work very hard for Sony not to try to 'repair' my TV. When the 'repair' team rang me they confirmed they had no idea what would cause the problem I was seeing and would do a full main board replacement.  This was less than a week after I had purchased the TV.   My retailer confirmed they didn't think that this was acceptable, and said they would exchange the TV.  However when I went to their store to test another TV, it was clear it had the same fault, so wasn't a fault specific to my TV, but instead a type-fault on all models of that type (in fact it seems it was all screen sizes in the XE9005 range)

To actually prove the fault analytically to Sony (who were initially very sceptical), I mastered an AVC HD DVD (i.e. a Blu-ray on a DVD disc) and an equivalent file (which I could play on a Raspberry Pi or a MacBook Pro with a Black Magic video output device) with a 720p50 recording with 50fps timecode burned into it. (I converted a high quality 1080i25 recording to 720p50 in ffmpeg, and added the timecode in FCP X).

This meant I had a video source where each frame had a unique and burned in 'frame number' to allow unambiguous documentation of missing or repeated frames. This material contained a recording of a native interlaced show that contained material that showed the 50Hz frame pair drop/frame repeat many times in three minutes.  It was a clip from an entertainment show which contained a lot of fast camera moves.  The source video was clean and had no frame drops or repeats.

I played this 720p50 video with timecode burned into the picture on a number of XE9005 displays with the same neutral display settings (on shop floors, my own one etc.)

I filmed the screen of each XE9005 on my iPhone in 240fps slow motion. I was then able to watch this through, and document which frame pairs were dropped, which frame pairs were repeated etc. They were often, but not always, close to shot changes.  Occasionally a single frame was dropped (which was incredibly obvious during a pan or track etc.)

I was able to also split the HDMI feed from a playback device and feed two different Sony displays (my older UHD SDR model and my UHD HDR XE9005) the same video and film them in slow motion close enough together that both screens could be seen in the same image. This showed the XE9005 drift compared to the older display that was absolutely rigid and regular.

Sony grudgingly accepted that this was, indeed, a fault that they hadn't fixed.  They confirmed that they saw the same issue with my test material (I uploaded an ISO for them to burn to check).  They agreed to replace my TV with an XF9005 under my original warranty, once I had tested an XF9005 and confirmed it didn't have the same fault. The retailer I purchased my XE9005 through transferred my additional 4 year warranty (which was free as part of the original purchase) to the new XF9005, which I have been very happy with. A significant number of Brits have had replacements of their XE9005.

The only solution with an XE9005 to avoid the frame drops/repeats was to run the TV in Game Mode (but that compromises other areas of the TV performance) or one of the Photo modes OR by doing something odd with Bluetooth Audio syncing. However this introduces so much vision delay, that many AVRs can no longer compensate (so isn't an acceptable solution) I ran my TV in Game Mode for 4 months until the XF9005 launched.  (Sony agreed to delay my warranty claim)