Been a long time since i have last taken a look at these sets. Since i got my reballing station at home now, i thought i'd give resurrecting the big 55" LG a shot.
And.... Reballed the CPU and IT WORKS!!! With a few catches. First, whoever helped mom move stuff around in her apartment after i left clearly didn't care any about my TV - i found it somewhere else than i had left it, and there is this beautiful crack in the left top side of the panel. Bummer.
I nearly cried when i saw it... But i can't blame anyone, it's been too long. I thought i might have caused that because in that day nobody wanted to help me with a lift and i carried this huge TV from mom's place all the way to the subway by myself (with some help from a passerby at some point), then a friend picked me up on the home end of the train. However it makes no sense as if i'd hit anything while on the way, it would have been in the middle of the screen as i was carrying it or the bottom corners when i was laying it back down to have a rest. Anyway, thinking about it isn't going to make the crack go away so i'll let that go now. At least i got the thing to turn on!
Ok... what else is wrong with it? Well, HDMIs 1 to 3 are defective, they let sound thru but as long as the cable is plugged in the picture flickers on both the TV and laptop, we just get a black screen with a cursor. So it sounds like the HDMI switcher IC needs replacement as well. HDMI4 on the side, which goes straight into the CPU, is working. The VGA input is working, and the cable input appears to be working too (we don't have cable anyway as neither of us watches regular TV programming so i don't care).
The CPU needs to be replaced eventually. It came back to life after reballing it, but it runs very, very hot and there are artifacts (colored lines and dots) in the menus (but not on the actual picture). Also if i try to use the built-in decoding capabilities (watch a movie from an USB drive) it goes all garbled and then crashes, the video playback keeps restarting from the beginning. I am pretty sure that plugging it into the network and attempting to use its (limited) smart capabilities is going to fail just as miserably. But at least as a big-ass monitor with no smarts, it is usable.
It's $25 for a CPU so not that terribly expensive, i cannot sell the main as it is so i will have to replace it anyway.My girlfriend says she likes the big TV and we can keep it as it is until we get a replacement, as a big TV with a small crack in it is better than no big TV at all. This makes me a little happier.
Before we mount it on the wall though, there is a blob of dirt towards the center of the screen that we will try to get rid of. Doing that to this absolutely huge and already cracked panel without ruining it completely will take some nerve... If we mess it up i can sell the boards and LEDs on ebay - i was planning on tearing it down anyway, but i thought i'd show it to her first, and it sounds like we're keeping it if we can get it clean without breaking it further. Moving on... I found a Tcon for the Grundig set for $10.50 on aliexpress so i ordered that. Then i have taken apart the Philips and found that besides the power supply it is also missing the cable from mainboard to Tcon. I have found a power supply locally (bit pricey though), but i'm still working on tracking that cable down.
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