TV Repair

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  • fred55

    Senior
    Aug 24, 2016
    1,772
    Spotsylvania Co. VA
    The tv was on and suddenly the screen changed into quadrants. The lower right quadrant was a still frame of the show I was watching, the other 3 quads were almost color test patterns. There was no sound on either. On power up I don’t even see the Vizio logo and selecting input does not display on the screen either. There have been no changes to the connections in over a year. Will unplug and see if that works, thanks. fred55
     

    geda

    Active Member
    Dec 24, 2017
    550
    cowcounty
    My 4 year old vizio did the black screen with sound thing when lockdown started, it was the backlights. When I shined a flashlight on the screen when it was on I could still make out that there was an image being displayed. I swapped the LED inverter board but that didnt work. Then hooked up an oscilloscope to the LED outputs and was able to determine which string was drawing too much current and overpowering the driver. I was able to bypass the bad string by unplugging half the LEDs and rewiring all the strings so that only alternating strings were on. This worked for a month before another LED went bad. At this point I bough a whole new set of backlights but broke the screen trying to get it out of the tv.


    Long story short I spent a dozen hours and $180 on parts and still ended up with a broken tv in the end. Just buy a new tv on blackfriday. If anyone wants them I have two sets of working boards for a vizio d65u-d2.
     

    fred55

    Senior
    Aug 24, 2016
    1,772
    Spotsylvania Co. VA
    Tried the unplug for several minutes - nothing. Tried the unplug, hold power button for 30 seconds, plug in, power on. Now on power on I get a series on power on light flashes, 12 or 13 flashes. Will pull back off to check, however, instead of ordering boards until it works I think I’ll just buy a new tv... it’s about 10 years old. Thanks for the help.
     

    Abuck

    Ultimate Member
    Long story short I spent a dozen hours and $180 on parts and still ended up with a broken tv in the end. Just buy a new tv on blackfriday. If anyone wants them I have two sets of working boards for a vizio d65u-d2.

    That’s the issue with so much of the new gear. If it’s not something quick and easy to fix, it’s not worth it. Even if you can fix it, why did that part fail? Cascade failures are fairly common, so what’s next?

    We had several benches full of all kinds of test gear, cabinets of repair parts, a closet full of old, tired gear, and a garage bay of broken gear to pull parts from. And if I needed to order parts, it was in someone else’s dime. If it didn’t fix this one, I could keep it for the next one. With 50+ pro VTR’s, 100’s of TV, and all the support gear, there was always a next one lol.

    Digital changed so much of that. It’s great when it works, but can be difficult when it doesn’t. Now it’s more board swaps than component repairs. The speed of digital is amazing. But speed equals heat. Lots of it. That’s an enemy to those components that keep getting smaller and smaller. And they really dislike power issues. If we had several pieces of gear act up I would check the UPS logs and could usually correlate the issue to a brown out. Voltage goes down, current goes up, and that would expose any weakness. It got to be that I was monitoring line voltage constantly year after year during the high demand summer months to report issues to the power company. From 3PM on, when businesses were still open, but people were getting home from work and cranking the AC, it’s amazing how bad the line voltage can get. We put as much as we could on a UPS, but not everything. One part of the building ran off of its own DC plant full of large 2V cells.

    Just a little glitch in power could have caused your issue. I run my TV and cable box though a small UPS to avoid those issues. Plus the box takes so long to reboot if it takes a dump.
     

    KJackson

    Ultimate Member
    MDS Supporter
    Apr 3, 2017
    8,614
    Carroll County
    Tried the unplug for several minutes - nothing. Tried the unplug, hold power button for 30 seconds, plug in, power on. Now on power on I get a series on power on light flashes, 12 or 13 flashes. Will pull back off to check, however, instead of ordering boards until it works I think I’ll just buy a new tv... it’s about 10 years old. Thanks for the help.

    Those light flashes should be an error code. I am sure that you can find out online what they mean.
     

    Raiderjack23

    Active Member
    MDS Supporter
    Jul 10, 2020
    171
    Carroll County
    So I’ve used these guys and they fixed my TV. They were Samsung certified, and recommended by Samsung, which is how I found. Now given the repair cost vs what a new TV costs, personally I think TVs are disposable items now.

    https://baltimoremdtvrepair.com/

    A second vote for Precision Electronics Repair (baltimoremdtvrepair.com). Had a 75 inch crap out under warranty. First two repair vendors told LG "thanks, but no thanks" and refused the job. The third was Precision Electronics who made arrangements to come to my house on a Saturday to fix the TV. He had to replace the display - Had the thing up and and running in just over an hour. Ask for John.
     
    As someone who started their electronics career repairing tube TVs (among other things) I will tell you unless it's something exceptionally inexpensive to fix it's probably not worth fixing. Labor is going to cost a minimum of $175-225 an hour. Diagnostics will take an hour, repair will take an hour and since there are only a few sub assemblies in a modern TV (it's more like a PC with a large screen than a traditional TV) the part or parts needed will probably exceed the cost of a new unit.
     

    Jed195

    Ultimate Member
    Oct 19, 2011
    3,901
    MD.
    I miss the Baynesville Electric store on Joppa road by Loch Raven blvd. They had everything in there.
     

    Abuck

    Ultimate Member
    Can't you just go to the local Radio Shack and use their tube tester to find the bad components? Then open the tube cabinet and buy a replacement? Who remembers doing that? I do.

    Radio Shack and the other local electronics stores were great. Always goodies to be found, and parts locally when you needed them. This generation just wont understand the satisfaction of keeping your gear going yourself.

    Had a Sencore Cr70 CRT checker and restorer. It had a rejuvenate function where it would zap the cathode with some current to clean them off a bit. Mostly it didn’t help, but it did enough times that it paid for itself. You could watch the tube neck and see some sparks as it worked. But, I had one of the new guys rejuve a CRT once, as he pressed that red button I snuck up behind him and smacked two tape cases together. I can still chuckle from how high him and one of the other techs jumped.

    An old timer told me how to check tubes, once. Said to drop them from a foot or two on to your bench. If they didn’t break it was because they had lost their vacuum. If they broke they WERE probably still good. Lol
     

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