is my $3,000 lcd tv dead?

TO EVERYONE: Great string. All very interesting and informative comments. I think I'm going to follow up with Sharp and see what their response is. It does seem "unlucky" of me for the TV to die after only three years. But sh$t happens as they say. However, the service tech I took the TV to seemed to be suggesting he sees quite a good number of these flat panels coming in for major service after only a few years. The major lesson here is definitely to get an extended warranty, which for some reason I chose not to do.

However, this is definitely a situation where, as a consumer, I need to stand up for myself - an in essence every other consumer out there spending big money on tech items that should last. The cynical side of my brain says technology is now being manufactured to be "disposable" since advancements (moore's law et al) are happening so rapidly.

thanks again for all your help and may the discussion continue.

pete

I know what you're saying, I have a large LCD TV that got toss from a TV shop because the quoted cost of repair was greater than getting a new set. I got the unit before it hit the scrapper.. A crack in a solder joint on the bottom side of a board where a header plug was.. It was obvious that no one took the time to really take it apart to inspect the obvious minor things that happen first. I think to many look for the technical version of the problem before the simplistic one..

I've found that mechanical error plays a higher role in faults than internal failures of components. when I say mechanical, I refer to cracked joints, missed soldered joints (no solder at all), bad basic contacts that some TV's have in their PS units, loose fitting header plugs, eroded pins etc...

--
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"
http://webpages.charter.net/jamie_5

I am not saying that one should not be pissed if a $3000 TV is not worth repairing after 3 years. What I am saying is that it may not be a problem that requires legislation.

Leonard

For many. Some of us still fix boards when possible and when we can get the parts and documentation needed. For many boards this is not possible, but starting with the assumption that you can't fix it is silly and wasteful. Or perhaps just lazy.

Leonard

Well apparently Indian software designers are now rated among some of the best in the world, surely they or the Chinese should be doing this kind of stuff far cheaper than us greedy westerners?

what ever happen to repairing the boards them self's? Has TV repair gone the way of car mechanic technicians?

I see many people who repair this stuff all the time not be able to do anything without a schematic . They cant take an electronic device and set it in front of them and spend 15 to 30 minutes checking the obvious They must have a schematic to find a bad fuse .

I got lucky having the chance to work on flat tv sets for a salvage store for 5 years . I first worked on a plasma set that had bad connections on one side of a huge several hundred lead SM chip . A carefull resolder & it was fine . The last flat set i worked on was last week . It was being sold for 50$ broken , a 32`` VISIO ,,LCD dated Aug of 06 . I gave the 50$ and took it with me . The power supply was clear full of solder problems with that crappy new type solder After redoing all the P.S. solders it works fine now .. it has a digital tuner in it .

I worked on dozens of others in that 5 years fixing several . Some of them i was able to track down problems by cheating . They had another set just like the bad one so i was able to swap boards to find the bad board then try to fix the board . Sometimes it was not possible to fix a board by chance . I found brand new sets with one plug hanging off inside somewhere or a simple re-seat of all plugs fixed it .

Some techs are not trained to do that .

Well, I'd argue that you pay for the software when you buy the car. If I buy a PC and it dies I still own the copy of windows. Replace the motherboard and whatever else is bad, toss the cd in and your up and going again. You allready paid for the software license.

I wonder what kind of car that was. My Chevy had a 10 year warranty on the ECU.

Mike.

That is a good point, I guess they charge as much as they do because they can.

That said, in 15 years of tinkering with cars, I've seen exactly one ECU failure, it was an '87 Volkswagen and I tracked the problem to a shorted electrolytic. I've also seen a number of later model Volvo ABS modules with cracked solder joints.

Never looked into the warranty, I've never owned a car as new as 10 years old, or had any particular desire to.

20+ years ago, GE performed warranty repairs simply by swapping out the product for a refurbished unit. This let the techs work on a pile of a single model, which is more-efficient than making repairs on random models.

So I don't understand why these companies don't simply swap boards, and let the folks at the "factory" perform component-level repairs.

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so you think you'd leave it up to the big corporations to defend the interests of the citizenry? History shows the dangers of that approach....

-B

If Sharp won't budge and refuses to give you whatever you ask for, (e.g. extend the warranty or give you a break on parts and/or labor), and if you don't want to pursue it legally, I'd consider asking them to at least allow you to get a service manual for the set (I'm assuming they normally don't sell service manuals to just anyone), and the ability to obtain any non-off-the-shelf component parts it might need.

With the service manual, any competent repair shop would have a good chance of fixing whatever's wrong at the component level (if you can find one willing to do so.) You might end up paying quite a bit of labor (for troubleshooting time, home visit, whatnot), but it still might be a less expensive solution than replacing an entire board or the whole set.

Good luck.

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I think the point was that these sets are advancing at a rate faster than their retail stream can keep up with. My favorite story about this is a thread I read on a plasma TV site where a fellow brought his brand new Panasonic plasma home, set it up with surround sound, etc., and turned it on for the first time.

The first show he viewed was a Consumer Electronics Show, and just as he began to watch they were showcasing the new Panasonic plasma that was the next year's replacement for his! Ouch!

Have just been through a warranty service experience with a Sharp over- the-range microwave where the Start button stopped functioning after only 3 months of use. While searching for a shop to do the repairs under warranty, a common answer that I got was "We don't do Sharp warranty work any more, it's too hard to get paid by Sharp."

Jerry

I do plenty of board repair - right now the demod of a Sony BVW-75 Betacam SP deck. When you get a board with nothing more than a half dozen 300-400 pin packages, do you really want to tangle with that? If you replace the wrong device, you just wasted a lot of time and money and the odds are very high that removal of the chip required its destruction so as to not damage the board. I have not had our DLP open but I have the service manual and there are some boards in there I would demand a replacement rather than a 'repair'.

GG

pete.nicks wrote: : When I plug in the TV I get a solid red light followed by one blink, : then two quick blinks, then a steady series of blinks (all red).

: I called Sharp and they directed me to a service center. I took the TV : in and was told something about the circuit boards that I didn't quite : understand. the service person didn't speak English very well so i : couldn't pinpoint with him the exact problem. But the gist of it was : that it wasn't worth it for him or me to fix it. The quote he gave me : was around $1000.

: The TV is only three years old and I paid $3,000 for the thing, so I'm : trying to figure out what exactly is wrong with it and whether I can : get it fixed.

: Any thoughts? Should I take it in to another service center for a : second opinion?...or does this problem sound like the unit is totaled? : for me, having to pay $1,000 means it is totaled.

: any thoughts would be appreciated.

Have you looked on ebay to see if anyone is selling off the boards from your model lcd? Usually a complete set of boards can be had pretty cheaply.

I have a working two year old SONY HD TV that I haven't even bothered to plug in. What little time my TV is on, is a 13" color set near my computer, to listen to the local news, and maybe watch a few hours of the Sci-Fi channel a week.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

yes, Ken. We know that you are the only person in the world who can show NASA how to launch the next shuttle mission with tin foil and Wesley's tire bleach, in spite of all the electronic equipment is missing.

They don't have to be 'trained', just observant. OTOH, the item shouldn't have left the factory with loose connectors.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Why not? It isn't that hard to do with the proper tools, and a little experience.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

One of those articles says extreme care must be used when moving a plasma tv, even laying a plasma tv down on it's side can permantley damage it. I am staying with my good old tried and true CRT tv sets and CRT computer monitors.That new fangled stuff is wayyyy too fancy and expensive for me. cuhulin