TV repair
- Thread starter LuckyDog4
- Start date
To be honest at the rate of technology in the TV world it is probably best to junk it. I used to pick them up from the roadside and fix them if it was cost effective. Now you can't get the parts, you have to get the entire circuit board and they ain't cheap. You can buy a really decent large screen for under $6-7 hundred and if you found a shop to fix yours you may pay near that for repairs. Sadly as with most things today it is cheaper to buy new than repair.
All electronics have gremlins. We used to have a Sparc server in our lab, if it lost power, you had to unplug at the pizza box and ground the neutral and hot wires before it would power back up.
As far as the tv goes, do a search and see if the mainboard is even available to the public and go from there.
As far as the tv goes, do a search and see if the mainboard is even available to the public and go from there.
Yep, fixed a lot of them back when the Chinese capacitor problem in the power supply PCB was happening. Pretty non-existent today unless the TV wasn't used or failed and they put it in the attic until now. One of those cheapest supplier things!
The same issue popped up with Dell workstation computers back about 10 or so years ago. Dell's supplier got a bad batch of counterfeit capacitors (so they said) and I was swapping out 1-2 motherboards per week for a while.
EVERY Computer Component manufacturer was hit with the fake Chinese capacitor copy debacle
Interesting. At the time, I was only exposed to Dell and HP machines and HP apparently got their caps from a different source.
Fair Enough ...
Chinese manufacturers STOLE the capacitor design from the Japanese ... made cheap copies that ended up everywhere ...
Motherboards, Video Cards, Power Supplies
Wiki blames Taiwan ... I remember hearing at the time the Caps came from Mainland China
Capacitor plague - Wikipedia
Implications of industrial espionage
Industrial espionage was implicated in the capacitor plague, in connection with the theft of an electrolyte formula. A materials scientist working for Rubycon in Japan left the company, taking the secret water-based electrolyte formula for Rubycon's ZA and ZL series capacitors, and began working for a Chinese company. The scientist then developed a copy of this electrolyte. Then, some staff members who defected from the Chinese company copied an incomplete version of the formula and began to market it to many of the aluminium electrolytic manufacturers in Taiwan, undercutting the prices of the Japanese manufacturers.[1][25] This incomplete electrolyte lacked important proprietary ingredients which were essential to the long-term stability of the capacitors[5][23] and was unstable when packaged in a finished aluminium capacitor. This faulty electrolyte allowed the unimpeded formation of hydroxide and produced hydrogen gas.[26][27]
There are no public court proceedings related to the alleged theft, as Rubycon's complete electrolyte formula remained secure. However, independent laboratory analysis of defective capacitors has shown that many of the premature failures appear to be associated with high water content and missing inhibitors in the electrolyte, as described below.[26]
What happened to electrolytic capacitors in the 21st century?
Chinese-made capacitors the drywall of the computing industry
Now we learn from the New York Times that bad capacitors are plaguing computers from Dell, HP, and others. In Dell's case, some 11 million failed due to capacitors poorly manufactured by Nichicon of China. Dell knew of the problem, but went to far as to deny it existed as to lie to its own legal firm, whose 1,000 own Dell computers had failed at roughly the same time. Perhaps denial was aided by Dell learning the problem affected 10x more computers than they first estimated.
(Capacitors even out the flow of electricity, by storing and then slowly releasing it. The components are used to suppress electrical noise, protect against power surges, and so on. They are made from tightly wound strips of very thin metal; a sign that they failed is that they bulge and leak insulating material. A sign of a bad batch of capacitors is that many related products will fail at roughly the same time.)
This makes me wonder if bad capacitors are the problem in HP's line of "tx" notebook computers, which are notorious for failing after a year or two. Like Dell used to, HP is still denying there is a problem. But my tx1000's motherboard failed twice in 18 months -- as has those of thousands of other owners. (The repair is $440, the cost of a new netbook. I had it repaired once under my credit card's extended warranty; but now it is techno-junk.)
How far will a hardware company go in denying liability? Here are the opening lines from the NYT article:
PeoplesElbow
Well-Known Member
That explains why we had a very expensive dual Pentium 4 processor workstation "crap its pants" one day,