Holy mother of TV scores!

[tvtimmy]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

I took a drive down to Chicago to buy a 65" 2010 Panasonic plasma for $50. He said it gave a 8 blink code. I looked it up and found that 5 poly film caps can crack open. I couldnot wait for replacements from ebay(china), so I bought them locally for $6 each. I cracked it open and it was the 5 bad caps! Put them in and it is fantastic! Bought 2 10 packs from ebay incase I find more of them.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Surprised i get this thread resurrected. Truth be told, i haven't done much with these sets since - ordered a new Tcon processor IC for the Grundig. $7 from China but it got lost somewhere and never arrived. And that's where it pretty much ended.

I am however set on fixing the 55" LG for myself. Since i moved with my gf there is a big white wall in the bedroom that just screams "big tv goes here". So big and so white that i have not bothered to put on the working 37" i have. It's either that 55" or a projector.

[Moreno83]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

I took a drive down to Chicago to buy a 65" 2010 Panasonic plasma for $50. He said it gave a 8 blink code. I looked it up and found that 5 poly film caps can crack open. I couldnot wait for replacements from ebay(china), so I bought them locally for $6 each. I cracked it open and it was the 5 bad caps! Put them in and it is fantastic! Bought 2 10 packs from ebay incase I find more of them.

Nice find!! What model name?

[tvtimmy]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Tc-p65v10

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

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.

[nomoresonys]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Nice.

I love plasma over ccfl/led. I haven't see the new oled tv yet though for any length of time.

After having and seeing all the backlight problems, the only new tv I will buy is oled, no backlight should equal a whole lot less problems, plus they are superior in many ways.

[ajshoe]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

the problems they will solve is when they no longer have a display - just throw out the window. You won't be repairing it.

[chrismurphy]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Sorry to say ,maybe not as good as find as you think
i suspect that someone knows , that they are not worth repairing
the best will be the 55 with back light issues but the others will not be worth it and probably not useful for parts
I never buy tv's that are faulty unless i know 90% what the fault is
Got a 65 inch samsung plasma 8500 and was free but knew the probable fault , was the ysus 3x10uf caps ,fixed ,probably worth $800 but i will probably keep

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

The 55" did not have a backlight issue, it had a bad processor. See above, you likely just read the first post.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Good news for the night. Turned on the 55" LG and i was greeted with the picture you see attached. That's right, the screen is healing by itself, the dead pixels went away!

What i have now realized is that besides those dead pixels which are now once again alive, the LCD glass itself isn't actually what's cracked! The scratch/crack is in diffuser layer behind the glass. So i now have to hunt for a cracked screen 55" set to steal the diffuser off of, and i will have a perfect set! Swapping diffusers in such a huge set is definitely going to be a challenge though.

[tom66]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

That's a weird fault! Maybe the set was dropped, and the diffuser wrinkled? Or, it could have overheated in a certain spot.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

No, i'm now thinking more along the lines of "fool opened it up to take a look, put a scratch in it". That also explains the few dirt spots inside the panel.

I think that nobody has hit the screen after all, i remembered now that the guy i got these off told me he suspects a bad panel in the 55" set. There is evidence of tampering on the screws holding the plastic frame onto the panel, so... yeah. Someone's been in here.

[diif]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

I did think it a little strange the crack showed no liquid leakage but I'm i'm not feeling so good so it didn't fully process.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Murphy... When you are looking for a TV to fix, there's cracked screens everywhere. When i am looking explicitly for a cracked screen now, i can't find any! The only thing close to what i need is a Sony 55" i've found here in town, but it is 4k (doubt it matters) and backlit rather than edgelit (this might matter).


I'm waiting for people who have torn down more screens than i did to chime in. Please tell me if the diffuser sheet behind the LCD glass is similar on most sets you have taken apart regardless of their resolution or backlight type, or are there differences. What i'm actually concerned most about is the screen having a slightly different physical shape at the sides of the frame, and not being able to fit the diffuser because of that.

[diif]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

I have a couple here, one from a 46" LG and the other a random 32".
The diffuser sheet varies in thickness slightly and the 46" has a slight white colour to it.

I think that looks like a tear to one of the polarizing films rather than a crack to the thicker plastic.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

^^ Yeah definitely, i likely used the wrong term to call it. It looks like the film immediately under the glass is what's torn.

[tom66]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

The good news is the film from a 55" screen should fit in pretty much any other 55" screen, so you may be able to use that.
Alternatively, you could consider swapping some of the films around, to hide the problem.
The films usually have alignment tags that align with the metal chassis for the LCD. So you can't usually get them the wrong way around.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

I found a cracked LG for sale locally, it is a newer model but it is the same size. Guy was very helpful over the phone, said he understand what i am trying to do and he'll let it go very cheap if it's useful to me. Time to bust out the measuring tape. I'll go see him on Saturday.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

Hadn't had time to update, coz i hadn't had time to do anything with it, either.

Bad news: The LCD panel is actually what's cracked. Very subtly (hence why it still works), but it does have a hairline crack. Polarizers are fine.
Good news: At least i got the dirt out... And so far the panel has not cracked further, i'm going to put it back together now and see how it ends up looking like.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Holy mother of TV scores!

And here she is in all her cracked glory.

I must say though, this thing has very accurate colors, no calibration was performed on it other than basic brightness and contrast (and labeling the HDMI input i am currently using as "PC", which, you know, although undocumented, bypasses a lot of the internal processing on all TV sets). Gamma is almost spot-on at 2.2 and the colors are vibrant but not overly saturated. The local dimming and ambient light sensor do a pretty nice job, too. You could totally do photoshop work or edit video on this thing - which is saying a lot given it's a TV not a monitor.

I have done some research and this TV had a $2799 MSRP at launch, back in 2010, and $2400 a few months later, based on the reviews i've found. Well, for the screen and internal build quality (especially the power supply and inverter), i must say that it likel was worth the money back then. The mainboard is its weakness.

The pictures really do not do it justice. It is a pity it's cracked, but it's not all that bad, and it will be going just like that onto the bedroom wall until i find something better to replace it.