Spring RTS Engine

Ok so after 7 months of my family borrowing my TV so I dont have to hear the horrid buzz of their CRT TV, they've managed to bugger it up somehow.

I have an LG 37LG5010, bought in November 2008 so it's out of warranty ( 1 year ). They're claiming they were watchign TV when all of a sudden it cut out (the picture). Sound still appears to work, as does the remote since key presses make the leds change as expected. The backlight still come son but nothing shows on the screen.

I did a little googling and somebody had suggested capacitors had gone bust and I can replace them individually on the cheap.

So where do I start? How do I avoid phoning a premium rate LG phone number and being charged more to repair it than it'd cost to buy a better model brand new?

If it is just capacitors, replacing caps isn't hard if you can get at the PCB. I've done it on a DVD-player that had a known flaw.

Where can I grab them though? Only places that come to mind are Maplin, but the last time I went there, they tried to sell me a 10m dvi->hdmi cable for £69 that was £2.50 on Amazon

AF wrote:Where can I grab them though? Only places that come to mind are Maplin, but the last time I went there, they tried to sell me a 10m dvi->hdmi cable for £69 that was £2.50 on Amazon

Dunno in England. In Canada I just went to radio shack where they sold little mixed grab-bags of caps. I had to eyeball each bag to make sure it had enough of the caps I needed (the ones that came with it had too low a voltage limit). A TV might need more special-purpose gear than my little DVD player did, though. I'm not an expert.

How its possible you only got 1 year warranty? EU regulation sets legally binding minimal warranty 2 years for all consumer goods..

Or its not yet implemented by UK law?

Licho wrote:How its possible you only got 1 year warranty? EU regulation sets legally binding minimal warranty 2 years for all consumer goods..

Or its not yet implemented by UK law?

EU, UK.

LOL.

So, my day job sometimes involves electrical engineering.

First off, if it is a cap, you'll have to find it. If you open the sucker up and there is one cap that is obviously swelled substantially or bust, well, there you go. A cap can swell a little (maybe 20%?) and still be OK, it's the really big one you want to look for. I'm assuming it will be one of the big electrolytic caps and not one of the tiny ceramic ones (look like little brown rectangles on the PCB).

If there isn't a visible burst cap... well, you could pull off caps and test them individually but this is waaay more trouble than it's worth, especially since it may as well not be a cap and possible be something else circuitwise. I'd say if you don't see an obvious cap, you should abandon this idea.

For caps, there are two critical values: The capacitance and the voltage. The capacitance needs to very close or right on compared to the one you are replacing. The voltage can be higher, and, in fact, since the caps you will be able to find off the shelf will be lower quality compared to the original, you probably want the voltage rating to be 20-30% higher.

Digikey, Mouser, and other electronics supply places let you look up parts for exactly what you need and order them online. The part will probably cost you all of 20 cents. You might need to buy a pack of 10.

Before you go desoldering the old cap, short it with a beefy screwdriver. Some caps store quite the charge (the caps in a CRT can store a lethal shock, actually) for a while once disconnected. Also, use a static bracelet if you've got one - it would suck to fix the cap and blow something else out in the process.

Good luck!

http://www.lg.com/uk/support/product/su ... b=warranty

Bought in November 2008

This is why I always buy expensive electronics with my mastercard, I've got this $2 a month thing where they double the warranty period up to an extra year. A "service plan" to do the same is usually like one hundred million dollars.

AF wrote:Ok so after 7 months of my family borrowing my TV so I dont have to hear the horrid buzz of their CRT TV, they've managed to bugger it up somehow.

I have an LG 37LG5010, bought in November 2008 so it's out of warranty ( 1 year ). They're claiming they were watchign TV when all of a sudden it cut out (the picture). Sound still appears to work, as does the remote since key presses make the leds change as expected. The backlight still come son but nothing shows on the screen.

I did a little googling and somebody had suggested capacitors had gone bust and I can replace them individually on the cheap.

So where do I start? How do I avoid phoning a premium rate LG phone number and being charged more to repair it than it'd cost to buy a better model brand new?

You're screwed.

Best way to fix a TV... sell it.

Swift, what brand of TV would you suggest?

I think he's just biased for some reason, there's nothing inherently bad about LG.

I've bought a few monitors in my time and had the odd problem here and there, but I've always been satisfied by Samsung. They do the panel lottery, but so does everyone else unless you buy something that's "professional grade" like an Apple 30" or one of the big Dells with an IPS panel. On the whole it seems like there isn't a huge difference between their "bad" panels and the "good" ones though, from what I've seen and heard.

If you want to be certain to get one you like, the only way to really do it is to go to a store with a laptop that has video out and do some tests on-site for all the usual things, then make sure the one you buy is from the same batch.

OLED should solve this to some extent though... I hope. It can't come soon enough.

AF wrote:Swift, what brand of TV would you suggest?

Samsung, Sony, Hitachi, Philips, Pioneer, Sharp, Panasonic. LG's are exceedingly prone to failure, and they have one of the worst customer support departments ever.

Evidence: http://www.hometheaterfocus.com/televis ... rands.aspx