I was visiting my sister some weeks ago and their TV had given up. It was an almost 10 years old, first generation plasma TV which was state of the art when it was new. Now it was about to be part of the gigantic
e-waste mountain the "
planned obsolescence" industry and our crazy I-always-want-the-latest-gadget society generates every year. To my luck, they asked me if I wanted to have it, in case I could repair it and hopefully make use of it for still some more time. Said and done, I stuffed it into our car and brought it home.
The TV set comes with the plasma screen and a separate tuner/input box. The two are linked with a vga cable with integrated stereo audio cables with cinch connectors.
The problem they have had was that the TV had begun to take some time to start-up and after a few weeks it got worse and they had to turn it off on the power button on the side of the TV a couple of times before it kind of got warm enough to come to light up.
Fixing the tuner box
When I got home and connected everything together, it seemed to me that the tuner box didn't want to start, because the power LED did some blinking, both green and red and the ended up in an amber colour. A quick google search, and I found
this thread on FixYa. Seemed that some PIP (Picture In Picture) board had a faulty fuse. One of the solutions was to disconnect the board completely, and to my big surprise the power LED did now stay green! However, now the SCART inputs didn't work. Only sound came through...hmm...however, replacing the fuse 1800 (
MP40, 400mA) and re-connecting the board did the trick.
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| Tuner box's PIP board with "replaced" MP40 fuse. |
Fixing the plasma screen
Next problem was the plasma itself. After removing a fairly large amount of screws, the back plate did finally came loose.
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| TV's back side. |
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| TV with back plate removed. PSU in the middle. |
The TV did take a couple of on-off cycles before it finally showed any picture. But google to my rescue! I was certainly not the only one trying to fix a similar TV. Turns out its a quite common error on these models (if not almost all plasmas) due to the high temperature they generate and is most often caused by some dried out capacitors in the PSU. On
this thread at avforums.com (22 pages long!). As I read the first pages I found out that I should try to change what seemed to be the most typical caps to fail, i.e. 2662 (25V 1000 uF) 2663 and 2664 (both 50V 100uF), but without any luck.
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| The PSU with the caps that I canged marked. |
However, on page 10, I found someone that had figured out the most fragile capacitors on the exact same model as mine. The post is found
here. I marked all those caps with a marker pen and found out that the caps were in smaller groups. By using the old hair-dryer trick I quickly found out that about 5 caps in one group was failing, because when pre-heated, the TV fired up instantly! These caps (2465,2508,2540,2541) were surface mounted (except one, 2510), so it was a bit tricky to remove without destroying the PCB. Actually one of the tracks came loose, and I had to replace it with a small jumper wire. The new caps were for hole mounts, so I had to bend their pins to fit the pads on the PCB.
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| New caps in place. |
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| Surface mounted caps replaced with standard ones. |
When the caps were changed, the TV lit up instantly, the fix had worked!
TV stand
Next thing was to get a stand for it, because I didn't want to mount it
on the wall. So a bit of carpentering, and voila! a nice TV stand. Sorry for the bad picture quality (taken with my mobile's cam in a dark room...)
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| TV on stand, back side. |
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| TV on stand, front side. |
