Plasma TV foggy area (update)

Glad to hear it was so easily fixable.

If you learn any more about the source of "the brown plague", please let us know.

So the glass you removed was not adhered to the plasma screen in any way?? I guess it was simply protection for the screen?

Odd, oh well.

us

nicotine ?

Yeah it just had some clips holding it in place. No adhesive of any kind.

After some pondering, I believe it may have been some kind of coating on the inside.. It had the texure of paint when touched, although it came off with just water and gentle wiping.. ?? Go figure.. I'm just happy that It was built how it looked like and the screen wasnt bonded to the glass.

It does look like that, although It is beyond me how it could have gotten between the panel and the front glass. I can't smell cigarettes on the tv, but that's not proof. Inside the vents on the top of the tv look like a large capacitor or something caught on fire and the smoke left residue on everything. I can't find any evidence of component damage though.

Maybe the person who owned this before was a chain smoker that kept their windows shut. haha..

I asked you if the owner was a smoker, you never answered. Cig smoke would be attracted to a charged object namely a plasma screen. Smoke can get in anything.

Honestly I dont know if he is or not.

Plasma screens don't employ high enough voltages to attract anything. CRTs had 20 times the voltage and I don't recall them ever being great smoke magnets.

Electrets.

Color CRTs commonly have anode voltages of 20K and higher, and attract dust like crazy.

duh, uh, oh yeah. I'd forgotten about how much I used to have to dust CRTs.

In any case plasma tvs don't use such voltages. I've been using a 50" plasma tv for the last 3 years and can only recall cleaning it a couple of times, mostly to remove fingerprints.

I think this tv was in a particulary dirty smoke environment due to the amount of crud just inside the case.

I noticed an intermentent shutdown after air dusting the PSU board. Took it back apart to find all kinds of sticky dust bunnies on the back of the board. It looks like they were shorting out the PSU due to one being quite black as if it were burned.

And to the case of HV attracting dust I think it is true.. The dust / crud follwed the HV traces on the PSU..

Hopefully thats all that was wrong.

Don't need HV to attract particulate contamination just a difference in static charges.

I repaired a lot of TVs in high school. Though I never came across one /that/ bad, I hated working on sets owned by smokers. The smell was bad enough.