Is it worthwhile getting a TV repaired these days?

You might be better off with a large computer monitor and get your TV reception through a Telstra TV box.
My Dell 24" monitor must be 10 years old and is picture perfect.
My "TV" is a 42" Panasonic in which the tuner has failed and was given to me but I get live and on demand programs via a Telstra TV box which will do Netflix, Stan etc also.
Getting rid of failed TVs is a big environmental problem these days and the dumps charge plenty to take them.
Is it worth fixing them?? I think not. Once the screen has gone it is worth nix.

I would give it a go if you have some technical aptitude. You can't make the problem worse. Just don't hurt yourself !

Take rear cover off, power on unit (hands off internals !), an get a non-conducting stick (eg plastic chop stick), and give the connectors/cabling/circuit boards a little tap to locate the fault. If you suddenly see the fault disappear and then reappear, then you know where the fault is located. If you get to this stage, then post a pic.

Follow basic safety precautions: plug unit into an RCD protected outlet when doing test above (all homes should have this). Wear safety glasses (in case something goes bang). Unplug unit from the wall if coming in contact with internal components. Have somebody around to watch you. Work on unit with only 1 hand. Remove any metal watches/jewelry. Wear nitrile/rubber (nonconductive) gloves for insulation. Assume everything is alive if you're not able to test for it. Avoid touching metal surfaces when you don't need to. Work slowly and carefully. No distractions !

Modern TVs have low voltages compared to the old days of CRT and plasmas, and much of the circuits (especially CRTs) all floated (very very dangerous !). I would not recommend anybody other than an experienced electronics tech to work on this old gear. The modern TVs have less hazards. But still, always respect high power circuits and assume the worse case scenario.

There's a few people challenging the 2 year warranties on failed TV's based on the fact that Australian consumer law requires goods to be fit for purpose, arguing that a TV that costs thousands should be expected to last a lot longer than 2 years. I saw a reddit thread on it and some people were getting replacements at no cost.

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FormulaNova said..
Assuming that its a terminal fault, any recommendations for good TVs? I have had two Samsungs, but I am partial to Sony from back in the day of trinitrons. I am thinking that these days it has more to do with the TV interface than anything else. I.e. the way you access different sources or Apps... all of which I never bother checking when buying a TV but end up being important to me.

I'm more than happy with my Aldi flat screens. The picture might not be as good as more expensive options in a side-by-side test, but do you really notice that when you are watching it at home on it's own? I know I don't. The sound they produce is unbelievably poor, but who cares about that if you're going to add external speakers. Then add a chromecast and you don't have to worry about what the TV apps are like.

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Magpieuser said..
Electronics tech of 40 plus years says no.

That will be the panel BTW. NWR.

Hello Magpieuser. There are not many of us around anymore

It pains me seeing bins full of faulty electronic equipment at Bunnings. Most of that equipment would cost less than $20 to fix IMO. I think as a country, we need to wise up a bit regarding this.

I say give it a crack. Just don't hurt yourself. If I lived close to FN, I would offer to fix it for him. He buys the parts etc

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Harrow said..
There's a few people challenging the 2 year warranties on failed TV's based on the fact that Australian consumer law requires goods to be fit for purpose, arguing that a TV that costs thousands should be expected to last a lot longer than 2 years. I saw a reddit thread on it and some people were getting replacements at no cost.

I think I will try this. I am trying to find out exactly when I bought it and how much I paid. Samsung have a contact number on the TV itself, so I will see what they say and then try a bit of pressure if they aren't helpful.

I wonder, what price would people expect to pay if they really expected their TV to only last 3 years? How much more would they pay for 10 years? When I looked at most of the options on a website, almost all of them had only a 1 year warranty. Would people be fine paying $6K for a set that only lasted just past 12 months? I wouldn't.

I still have the first Sony LCD TV that I bought. It's a whopping 68 or 80cms, but it still works perfectly. It has to be quite old now.

Similarly the predecessor to this Samsung, also a Samsung is doing fine.

If Samsung say 'bad luck' I will switch to a different brand just to see if they are any better. LG seem to be getting good reviews.

I am not sure I am willing to go to an Aldi branded TV, or any other 'yum cha' brand. I know they can be good, but I still can't make myself do it. I guess it helps a bit that a lot of the apps I use are in Fetch TV, and probably supported on even the cheap TVs.

Agree with warranty as 3 years is not the reasonably expected lifespan for a thing that sits on a shelf not subject to vibration or extremes of weather etc. Designing lifespan into electrical goods is common but it is close to unlawful when one considers our solid consumer laws in Australia. Nobody expects a TV to last 3yrs.

As an aside, best things I ever learned in this (sort of) area:

Capacitors. I have had work tools that just hum and won't start - capacitor. $20 replacement saved a $1500 compressor. $8 saved a vac pump.
Mate had an LG telly that was pretty flash for its time, was just really slow to fire up and after a few mins you could watch TV. Just annoying but it was clearly on the way out. He replaced it but had googled and results said capacitors......
Free TV for me, never seen inside one but it took a couple mins to open up and see a 2 caps were swelled. Replaced 2 of them - with $5 for 10 of them on eBay (!!) and still using it 10yrs later.
Or fridges - if the freezer is cold and the fridge isn't, its just the fan that circulates air from the two.... might be dead but more likely full of crap. Blow it out, vac it out or just rock the thing side to side until some grey sh!t lands on the floor. People throw out $3K fridges due to dust ingress in a $20 fan. Wow.

Family and friends often give me broken electronics to repair. It's amazing how many times just pulling it all apart and putting it back together fixes it.

9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/tell-us-your-story

WTF ?

"A Current Affair with Ally Langdon" ??

Who is Ally Langdon ? I thought Tracey Grimshaw did A Current Affair ?

What is going on ? The world has gone crazy. Did Tracey get Covid and have to isolate or something ?

#WhereisTracey ?

I would favour Samsung over LG (low grade) for reliability/performance. Service from manufacturer may well be similar.

There isn't a huge amount in it though, especially when compared with the Chinese specials that aren't that much cheaper but are incomparably poorer in most ways.

Sony probably are good TV's but my understanding is that they are mostly LG or Samsung electronics and certainly the panels are made by one or the other in Korea.

Sony have never made a flat panel TV as far as I am aware. Their last TVs actually made in house were the excellent Trinitron CRT jobs.

Sony is a shadow of its former electronic self unfortunately. Don't make much at all except PlayStation's.

And yes there aren't many techs left jn1.....

Oh and yes caps were a favourite fault some years ago but not so much now. The Chinese have now worked out how to make them last a little longer...and perhaps also not over rating them so much. Whatever the change, electrolytic caps are rarely the main cause of an issue now. Bugger!!

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FormulaNova said..
Oh, special call out to Carantoc....

Hey there FN, how'se you going.
Special call out right back at ya.

You still all in a huffy about something ? Weird hey, sorry for not understanding but you might have to give me a few more hints what da prob-lemo is.

Over in another thread you said this :

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FormulaNova said..
......
If not, how has this happened? It's almost as if the government have just blindly accepted ........ and not thought about the impact that they will have on ...... or any other ..... I know its a really simple way to ....., but surely they put some thought into it. Didn't they?

Wouldn't ya know..., that is the exact same thing I said about another topic.

But when I said it you got all weird-eo and cancelled anyone you didn't agree with.

In the words of Will-I-am and Fergie....
That was a different thing
No it ain't
That was a different thing
No it ain't
That was a different thing
It was the same damn thing

Are you gonna cancel anyone who rates LG better than Sony ?

Shut up
Just shut up
Shut up
Shut it up, just shut up

Look, all I am saying is that if I can't watch Tracey Grimshaw then TV is dead to me. Dead to me.

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FormulaNova said..
My Samsung TV has just developed a green section on the lower quarter of the screen. It's only 3 years old....

May I suggest the next step is to check you are not watching the golf.

That tends to have a green section down the bottom.

To check if it is this issue try changing channels to watch the swimming. That should put a blue bit down the bottom.

If you find football, snooker and lawn bowls all have the same "green section down the bottom issue", but swimming, pool and darts don't, then we may have found the root cause of the issue.



Edit : Cricket tends to have a green section filling the whole screen, but with little white figures standing about. So from your description of it being only at the bottom I have decided that may not be the issue.

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Macroscien said..

Mark _australia said..
Agree with warranty as 3 years is not the reasonably expected lifespan for a thing that sits on a shelf not subject to vibration or extremes of weather etc. Designing lifespan into electrical goods is common but it is close to unlawful when one considers our solid consumer laws in Australia. Nobody expects a TV to last 3yrs.

As an aside, best things I ever learned in this (sort of) area:

Capacitors. I have had work tools that just hum and won't start - capacitor. $20 replacement saved a $1500 compressor. $8 saved a vac pump.
Mate had an LG telly that was pretty flash for its time, was just really slow to fire up and after a few mins you could watch TV. Just annoying but it was clearly on the way out. He replaced it but had googled and results said capacitors......
Free TV for me, never seen inside one but it took a couple mins to open up and see a 2 caps were swelled. Replaced 2 of them - with $5 for 10 of them on eBay (!!) and still using it 10yrs later.
Or fridges - if the freezer is cold and the fridge isn't, its just the fan that circulates air from the two.... might be dead but more likely full of crap. Blow it out, vac it out or just rock the thing side to side until some grey sh!t lands on the floor. People throw out $3K fridges due to dust ingress in a $20 fan. Wow.

Amazingly there is less and less technicians able to fix electrinonics or just understand what is inside and how it works.
I remember 20 years ago seeing asian technician able to fix almost any electronic device with just multimeter, oscilloscope and soldiering iron. Without the need for any diagrams or schematics. This days I have a long quee of devices and tools lying in my workshop and waiting for better times to get fixed. For example.
1.Hydraulic wood log splitter . Capacitor to replace on motor $15
2. LG washing machine . Technician ask $950 plus labour to replace comptuer board but all is needed $10 thermistor.
3.plasma cutter fixed at $600 and failed soon after
4. Golf buggy motor controller??
But at this moment in time the only hope is in YouTube DIY

It is a dying skill as there is less work, therefore less people want to learn.

There is the serviceman that runs a column in Silicon Chip magazine. He advertises that he is willing to have a go at fixing things, and even though he is based in NZ it may make sense for somethings especially if it is expensive and almost impossible to replace.

Manufactures make things hard to repair these days, especially at component level. It makes more sense for them to stock replacement boards than to identify bad components. Sometimes this can be a benefit. As a case in point, I had a kelvinator AC unit fail and a simple board swap got it working again. I decided to risk it as a tech would just do the same anyway. The cost of the board was probably only slightly more than an hour of a tech's time to look at it, so it made sense. But I think a lot of manufacturers don't even want to provide these spares anymore, so even this will become more and more difficult.

Things these days are often too complex to fix anyway, unless it is engineered into them. Microcontrollers are so cheap that it makes sense to do a lot of things with them and how do you troubleshoot something that could literally be programmed to do anything? You just need to replace it.

In theory Australia has rules where manufacturers are to provide a reasonable amount of spares at reasonable costs, but I wonder if this really happens? In the case of your LG washing machine, surely $950 is more than is justified if a new machine is close in price.

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FormulaNova said..

Macroscien said..

Mark _australia said..
Agree with warranty as 3 years is not the reasonably expected lifespan for a thing that sits on a shelf not subject to vibration or extremes of weather etc. Designing lifespan into electrical goods is common but it is close to unlawful when one considers our solid consumer laws in Australia. Nobody expects a TV to last 3yrs.

As an aside, best things I ever learned in this (sort of) area:

Capacitors. I have had work tools that just hum and won't start - capacitor. $20 replacement saved a $1500 compressor. $8 saved a vac pump.
Mate had an LG telly that was pretty flash for its time, was just really slow to fire up and after a few mins you could watch TV. Just annoying but it was clearly on the way out. He replaced it but had googled and results said capacitors......
Free TV for me, never seen inside one but it took a couple mins to open up and see a 2 caps were swelled. Replaced 2 of them - with $5 for 10 of them on eBay (!!) and still using it 10yrs later.
Or fridges - if the freezer is cold and the fridge isn't, its just the fan that circulates air from the two.... might be dead but more likely full of crap. Blow it out, vac it out or just rock the thing side to side until some grey sh!t lands on the floor. People throw out $3K fridges due to dust ingress in a $20 fan. Wow.

Amazingly there is less and less technicians able to fix electrinonics or just understand what is inside and how it works.
I remember 20 years ago seeing asian technician able to fix almost any electronic device with just multimeter, oscilloscope and soldiering iron. Without the need for any diagrams or schematics. This days I have a long quee of devices and tools lying in my workshop and waiting for better times to get fixed. For example.
1.Hydraulic wood log splitter . Capacitor to replace on motor $15
2. LG washing machine . Technician ask $950 plus labour to replace comptuer board but all is needed $10 thermistor.
3.plasma cutter fixed at $600 and failed soon after
4. Golf buggy motor controller??
But at this moment in time the only hope is in YouTube DIY

It is a dying skill as there is less work, therefore less people want to learn.

There is the serviceman that runs a column in Silicon Chip magazine. He advertises that he is willing to have a go at fixing things, and even though he is based in NZ it may make sense for somethings especially if it is expensive and almost impossible to replace.

Manufactures make things hard to repair these days, especially at component level. It makes more sense for them to stock replacement boards than to identify bad components. Sometimes this can be a benefit. As a case in point, I had a kelvinator AC unit fail and a simple board swap got it working again. I decided to risk it as a tech would just do the same anyway. The cost of the board was probably only slightly more than an hour of a tech's time to look at it, so it made sense. But I think a lot of manufacturers don't even want to provide these spares anymore, so even this will become more and more difficult.

Things these days are often too complex to fix anyway, unless it is engineered into them. Microcontrollers are so cheap that it makes sense to do a lot of things with them and how do you troubleshoot something that could literally be programmed to do anything? You just need to replace it.

In theory Australia has rules where manufacturers are to provide a reasonable amount of spares at reasonable costs, but I wonder if this really happens? In the case of your LG washing machine, surely $950 is more than is justified if a new machine is close in price.

There is room and hope for AI that will comes to our rescue.
Every problem was already solved or fixed by somebody somewhere.
What we need is algorithm now designed to storage solutions in big database, sort, organise and supply on demand the answer.
What YouTube is already doing to some extend.
But we need Wiki like database that one day consists How to service or repair every device on Earth. I don't mind even pay a dollar or two to learn. So both provider of video clip can be paid, AI database for service.
This days to find answers you need to spend hour browsing troght multiple forum video etc because everything is randomly fed into internet storage. But our satabase should be organised by device type, manufacturer etc.
I can even imagine in few decades from now return of skilled repairman fixing things as that is environment friendly to fix instead throw to landfill.
Repair could be made by robots most likely because people will have better things to do then get hands dirty.
I hope windsurfing will be still in fashion.
I can imagine service centres around every city where you coukd fix everything from kitchen hardware to electrics and vehicles.
Many parts could be 3D printed on-site without the need to wait for replacement parts. Not only plastic but complex metal parts made now by laser deposition.
BTW my Samsung TV also developed red net like pattern on left side on screen .

Has it had The Shot?

Boosted?