Sometimes, when you buy an expensive piece of consumer electronics, something happens to take the shine off it. Dead pixels certainly come under that heading. Ostensibly a difficult-to-avoid manufacturing risk specific to LCD screens, dead pixels are just that: pixels which don"t work. They can be quite frustrating.
Most of the time you don"t notice them, but somehow once you do your eyes are drawn to them. We"re staring at ours right now. Molly-molly-molly-mole! Worse, we once bought a laptop from a well-known mail order firm which had a pair of them about three-fingers width apart, only to be told that screens with less than a handful didn"t qualify for replacement. Happy days.
Fortunately though it seems that consumers who pick up the Nintendo DS handheld, released in the US on November 21st, won"t have to put up with the problem to any degree - despite a number of reports of dead pixels from early adopters. In a statement issued soon after the problem came to light, Nintendo offered to inspect and even fix the problem at no cost as long as the machine is returned within the one-year warranty period.