"As seen on TV" dummies

Hilarious...

Samsung TV repair

Consider this a public-service announcement for anyone who owns a Samsung flat-panel TV that is ~ 2 years old. A few months back, our 46-inch Samsung LCD starting having a few extra "clicks" on when powering it up. Eventually, a few clicks turning into 15 seconds of clicks, then 1 minute of clicks, then several minutes, then >10 minutes, and then it would no longer power up. I was extremely unhappy, since this TV was about 1.5 years old (warranty expires after 1 year). A little searching on the web showed a lot of Samsung owners having a similar problem - almost always after the warranty expired. In almost all cases, the root cause was some blown capacitors on the power-supply board. It seems Samsung used sub-par (read: "cheap") capacitors that were not of high enough voltage rating. These capacitors would eventually explode, resulting in the TV never powering up. I tried calling Samsung first - their "tech support" guy knew nothing of the problem... When I told him "Just do a Google search, you'll see all kinds of complaints", he just said "So what, he wasn't going to even look". I tried escalating to Samsung, but that just resulted in some dead email links.

I ended up fixing it myself. It took about 1 hour start to finish, and most of that time was taking it all apart and putting it back together. The soldering job was 5-10 minutes. It now works as good as new! Pics below. Not sure I'll ever buy Samsung again...



Found lots of good information here and here.

If you find yourself stuck with the same problem, give me a buzz!

Abby riding a 2-wheeler!