Video to highlight the problem of repairing flat panel TV sets
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- This TV came in for repair with sound but the backlights were not lit , however further tests revealed the backlights were not faulty and it also highlights the problem repair engineers are faced with today , with no circuit diagram, no technical support from the manufactures, it it so easy to miss diagnose a problem and end up replacing the wrong part.
Lets face it TV set makers don't want engineers fault finding to component level , this will not make them money ,what they really want is for customers to bin the faulty TV and buy a brand new one .
Loved it! I was the chief technician of a major service center in the US before I became disabled and forced into retirement. So I tell you the story I know you're going to get a kick out of it. So now I'm 62 and completely a quadriplegic from the neck down. I have 2 nurses that take care of me. So my female nurse age 56 was my technician for this project. Her son has a LG 65 inch 4k TV that he says powers up then shuts down. He tells me he's going to throw it away. Now he knows that I was a chief technician for a long time before I retired but he's determined he's not going to work on it it's something massively expensive and I'm telling him we can repair this if you will be my hands. So he decides you can have the TV if you want it. Absolutely I said! It sits in my house about a month. So I asked my nurse and she agrees to try. I have trained many technicians through the years your technique was beautiful. I wish we had worked together. Anyhow I downloaded a schematic diagram, looked it over for the most likely possibilities, capacitors, connections, and power supply sources and how to determine if the LEDs will trigger the main board to shut down the power supply to the driver board. We tested a few things and I determined the LED strips were bad. I figured my odds of getting her weld a LED on a strip that was defective was pretty slim so I just purchased the full array for $50 on eBay. At about this time her dad walks in the door and sees the exploded views. LOL at every step along the way she's saying what's next, what's next, what's next. This time when she said what's next, I looked over the TV, everything was connected, everything was mounted, all of the screws except for the ones in the back were all used. I said plug it up! Really, she said. I saw the LEDs come up and stay up this time I knew it was working and I said good job it's working. She had to look underneath but the smile on her face when she said wow it's got a beautiful picture. I told her dad I have trained dozens and dozens of technicians over the years. She did everything right, she didn't break anything, she put everything back exactly the way it was from the factory. I could not have done better. Anyhow about 200 screws later she did a fantastic job. I'm sure you have seen all kinds of butchered electronics where other technicians have worked on them. Unless you take fingerprints I'm willing to bet you that you would never know anyone was ever inside much less take had it completely apart the change the LEDs. I should have videoed the entire thing it would have made a great TH-cam video. A total of 4 hours later I have a working 4K 65 inch LG TV For a computer monitor. Like and subscribe I'll be watching other stuff you do I will be helping sitting here saying, check that I bet that's what's wrong with it! :-)
Women are ideal for working on delicate jobs due to having small hands , I got my daughter to replace the headlamp bulb in my car because I just couldn't get my hand into a very small space, in fact if you look back into the history of radio manufacture in the UK most sets were hand built by women, you did the right thing replacing all the LEDs, I tried just replacing the faulty ones years back but then a few weeks later the set comes back with a different failed LED and you have to do the job all over again , after replacing the strips always turn down the BACKLIGHT setting down to reduce the current passing through the LED S this will ensure a much longer life .
@@michaeldranfield7140 sounds like you should replace all the LEDs at once.
@@mrtechie6810 of course , I never replace individual strips in the backlight , its all the strips or nothing .
You should have given the TV to your nurse!
@@dperreno We don't know his financial situation and I'm sure we can both agree that someone who is quadriplegic from the neck down has a lot fewer options of how to spend their free time. He will definitely get more use out of it than she would.
We of the old school have been replaced by board changers, who have the nerve to call themselves technicians , who probably have had no training to component level, and this TV would have been a scrapper, I despair. marvellous video
The tables have turned full circle, there was board swapping in the 80s and lots of companies advertising in Television magazines selling used boards for thorn 3500 etc so anyone with no skill could repair a TV, then in the 90s all this disappeared with the single pcb and now 40 years later were back to board swapping!
Consider the value of a TV compared to the cost of the repair.
It it took 2 hours to take apart, fault find, replace component and put back together again, that's about the value of the TV in used condition..
Most people don't want to pay more to repair something than it's actually worth, unless it's got some sentimental value in which case there's big money to be made off the customer
In the USA, we had all 3 major brands were boards. Vert, horz, audio, ect. RCA, MAGNOVOX, ZENITH, all board's. Then again, I'm 62 now @michaeldranfield7140
30 year Aircraft Avionics Tech here. This is the about the best example of Troubleshooting I have yet seen on TH-cam. Nice to see a fellow Technician fighting the good fight against engineered obsolescence. Cheers form the U.S.A. !!!
Many thanks for that.
This is the clearest and best explained video on TH-cam. No nonsense or rambling, just clear and concise explanation. Excellent work 👍🏻
Thankyou for that , I try not to spin out videos over long periods .
My hats off to your sir. As a retired TV repairman, you have my respect! It is nice to find someone on TH-cam that actually knows what they are doing. That meter you made is a lifesaver when it comes to troubleshooting shorts.
I wouldn't imagine there are many people still repairing TV s for a living, everyone I know has closed down years ago.
@@michaeldranfield7140 As I said I was a retired repairman. When everybody started going to surface mount components I knew the repair business was in trouble. I really don't miss the repair service but every now and then I come across a repair video and watch it. Yours was refreshing! A lot of the people making repair videos are noticeable amateurs with just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
Good stuff Michael. Just imagine how many flat screen tv's have been scrapped for the sake of such minor component failure! All intentional of course, and why detailed service info is not made available.
And when you scrap these, not so much material got back in use. At least those panels need rare earths metals and looks like China is way to get these. There is not much in one panel, but if you throw all away with junks, then those are gone. Not even sure does anyone try to get these off from electric waste to recover those materials, but I know many who took full flat from waste and fixed it to use :p
If you could fix one flat per day and one fix fails and goes spare parts, you still could get living with that and if you have source to get these throw aways, then it's even better :p
absolutely right and all designed just to sell another one as you say .
@@michaeldranfield7140
So bad for the environment though, thousands of tons of various metals that are lost to landfill, some toxic of course. Plus plastics, glass and chemicals, all the energy involved in manufacture, distribution, delivery etc. An extremely wasteful and irresponsible policy. The right to repair legislation that is being debated in the USA currently, should be mandatory worldwide, with full, detailed service info being a legal requirement. We can wish anyway!
@@michaeldranfield7140 That's what they mean when talking about "sustainability".
@@michaeldranfield7140 Made to break just after the warranty expires.
I find that another common problem is the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply fail quite often or a heatsinked semiconductor.
Brilliant video and great fault-finding. Think of all these sets that go to the bin because of a component costing a quid or 2! It's a pity and rare, stuff like this just don't get repaired in the world of today.
I would imagine most people would have wrote this set off after disconnecting the T con board thinking the LCD panel was faulty.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Possibly, but what isn't being said is the labor costs in fixing things. e.g motor vehicles being a big one. Plus I also remember when I had a Panasonic boom box decades ago and had to replace a volume potentiometer. Replaceable, but needed to be ordered from the manufacturer and expensive to boot.
My cousin had a booming business fixing sets years ago but transitioned to other stuff , it just petered out
You’re forgetting the old adage.
Cost of hitting boiler with hammer £1
Knowing where to hit it £999
@@aloysiussnailchaser272 Yes I have heard of that saying in the past .
Excellent video and a fantastic master class of fault finding. Technicians change parts until the equipment works, an ENGINEER finds the problem, fixes it then finds out why it happened in the first place, you sir are an ENGINEER!
unfortunately now fault finding is more good luck than skill as no one produces schematic diagrams now and everything is board only replacement .
You are the best teacher. I have been a mechanic for around 40 years and have been teaching myself electronics. You attack diagnostics on circuit boards like I diagnose cars, and it makes it much easier for me to understand.
Thank you!
I remember the good old days walking down to Walgreens with a bag of tubes for the tube tester.
Unfortunately with no service manual or circuit diagram this is the only way you can diagnose modern electronics.
Thank you Michael. First time I've seen your channel. Used to have a Samsung Service centre about 3 Miles away in Rustic Mid Wales. Bumped into him and said got a backlight problem, ' No given up, Couldn't make it pay ' Bloody shame really. Tried people for miles around, but nobody wants to get involved in component repairs. One repair was again a capacitor, £ 20.00 quid job, but he worked liked you, eliminate, and know your stuff.
Just like the done thing these days is to replace the whole board when it has a fault if the backlights are faulty you should replace the whole LCD panel, and on some sets even with a separate T con board the T con is not listed as a replaceable item and it comes with the LCD panel, I don't make this pay either but its the only thing I have ever done so I can't stop!
You make a very good point “is that all it was!” Had that experience!
Yep that's all it was, a less than 10p cap.
Just watched your repair by the accident of randomly touching on my tablet screen! This is good old detective work needed to fault find anything and only learned from experience. Young technicians need mentors like you to pass on the knowledge. Thank you for sharing.
Only problem been there is no younger people going into TV repairs now , its a dying trade and any repairs now are supposed to be carried out by just swapping a board or in this case the correct procedure would have been to just fit a new LCD panel which would have been so expensive the customer would not have had it done .
My dad was TV Radio repair guy from the early days when TV came out, and still serviced TV's and other electronics till he was in his 70's. Taught himself these things. Passed away in 2000. I'm the youngest of our family and picked up a lot of this from him and on my own.
As of the past few years I decided to repair flat panel monitors and some of my TV's. Main problem is the capacitors often in the power supply side, and often none of them show any signs of leaking. So replacing all of the electrolytic type ones is the main cure.
Problem is I now have many used monitors that are good, but people still want to buy the new stuff. This might change if our economy get much worse. Glad to know of someone that is till doing component repair.
About 6 years ago I took a blue-ray player/surround sound system to a repair shop and they required a $80.00 deposit to even look at the unit, but told me if they can fix it then the $80.00 will go toward the repair cost. I knew it was one of the amplifier chips or something in that area since it had three amp chips, and two of the channels did not play. They told me they could not get the main board so it could not be fixed. I was pretty upset at that answer, I figured a professional shop would do component repair. If this is the that repair business then they really don't need much electronic talent if all they do is replace the circuit board and collect money.
Thank you Michael for being one of the good repair guys!
Unfortunately these days there is no fault finding to component level, the shop will have had to replace the whole board because there is no circuit diagrams in the service manual, this is all done in an attempt to make an item not repairable so you just buy a new one, I only attempt component level fault finding because that's what I grew up doing and I still find it very exciting but in reality I come across lots of items I have to scrap simply because there are no circuits available and a new board exceeds the value of the item, all this takes time so you won't get many people attempting component level fault finding, you could easills spend an hour and not find the fault.
Thats exactly what happened to my refrigerator that costed me 7K when I bought new and the tech who looked at said the main system board needed replacement and would cost be $1200 to fix it. Well, this is what I did - Got a new freezer for $180 (that I needed anyways) - moved all the food to that freezer and got the board on my bench. Well, it used to be a bench in the early 90's, not anymore.
The issue was with a shorted rectifier that blew the SMD fuse. I had to wait for 5 days to get the $3 parts and the refrigerator was humming like brand new. I agree, the component level fault finding talent is long gone, however some do retain that passion.
This is why there is so much e-waste. An expensive TV lost to a 5 pence capacitor. A great video, I'll bare this in mind when my 3D TV fails as I can't replace it now 3D is not a thing anymore. Thanks Michael for sharing.
Just imagine how many more sets that could be repaired if manifactures supplied service data and spare parts.
That was absolutely brilliant and informative. You should consider doing learning workshops like Louis Rossman. He does these self help workshop classes where people come in with their faulty electronics to fix themselves and Louis donates his time to supervising and offering advice and guidance to help those people repair their own stuff.
Knowledge should always be passed on even if one is retired because the knowledge and experience gained is priceless.
I repair for a living so doing self help wouldn't pay my bills, we do have a repair cafe in my town where volunteers do exatcley that and for free.
My grandfather opened a radio repair shop (Taller Marconi) in 1936 in a tiny town in Colombia. Needless to say, there wasn't much in the way of technical support from manufacturers so he figured out all the internal workings of the radios and made a living fixing them. When TVs came out he did the same thing and figured it out. Then VHS came out ( BETA in Colombia) and once again, they found a way to repair them down to component level. My father and two of his brothers eventually learnt the trade and took over from him when he retired. Thank you for your video and the memories. I remember my dad replacing tiny components in PCBs to get them back to work.
In those days all electronic components were big things and as you quite rightly say a lot of stuff could be repaired without a service manual, however today with micro sized component, some so small there is no space to print a part number on them a service manual is the only hope of doing a repair.
Great fault finding skills there, one thing I would have done differently is replace all decoupling caps if they're exactly the same, if one failed, the rest will follow
That is good advice but unfortunately customers are now much more price conscious and seem to want everything doing for next to nothing , this is why I only replaced the faulty part, however in the case of backlight failure where its a big job removing the panel without damaging it I only ever replace all the backlight strips , I never replace individual LED s as some people do .
@@michaeldranfield7140
This is an ever increasing problem -
Consumers imagine because the device they purchased is relatively inexpensive -
that it should be also inexpensive to repair - where in reality it is becoming more
difficult on many levels - including lack of service information - NO service Manuals -
No Service Bulletins - Lack of major replacement parts after four years (which is the
Statute of Limitations in respect of warranties) so anything beyond that is NOT
covered - despite Manufactures claims of extended warranties. Law is Law.
The general population has no concept of the knowledge and skills required to
earn and understand how these technologies work - the time taken to learn and keep
up to date with developing technologies and the high cost of investment in equipment
- and its replacement and maintenance costs - addition and replacement of
equipment and $$ invested in stock that may soon become obsolete - and considered
an economic loss - Then there is the cost of Stock control and administration of
a business - insurance of various kinds - accountants fees - Office requirements & supplies.
+ one has to make a better than average living - That is the whole purpose of a business.
PLUS the business has to make a profit to allow for future expansion and growth.
Plants need Liquid water -- Business needs Liquid assets.
It is not the cost of the replaced part -- it is the cost of knowledge and experience and the
cost of doing business.
Life is difficult - Business is equally difficult - Customers can be difficult
EXAMPLE:
▶ ‘We cannot survive’: Businesses struggling with costs
th-cam.com/video/qUn5rGfOIyQ/w-d-xo.html
Jun 16, 2022 05:54 -----------------------------
CHANNEL: Sky News Australia
th-cam.com/channels/O0akufu9MOzyz3nvGIXAAw.html
; Appetite Five Dock Co-Owner Phillip Salhab says his business
; “cannot survive” as his venue struggles to hire staff and deal
; with rising cost of living prices.
My component-level knowledge is very limited, but I absolutely love watching videos like this.
Great work in preventing yet another tv from a destiny of landfill.
This was actually a relatively simple fault, I could repair more complex faults if I could get service data and some support from the manifactures.
@@michaeldranfield7140 any repair is of interest to me, no matter how big or small 😀
@@michaeldranfield7140 We need to lobby government for a right to repair law, which would make it illegal for manufacturers not to supply the circuit diagrams.
Same goes for car's with the stupid reprogramming the ECU when you fit a new battery. Pure Greed.😔
Very instructive video Micheal, being a now retired tech who started in the trade in the monochrome valve TV era I always relied on the ubiquitous and comprehensive service manuals that were current then.After many years experience the manuals were only referenced if the fault was a curly one as one became attuned to parts that commonly failed and most were carried in the service van and the majority of repairs could be done in the customers house. Only the curliest were taken back to the workshop.
Nowadays though very little can be done in the house in the way of repairs and all sets get the workshop treatment.
Prior to retirement about 5 years ago I was a service agent for several brands and got pretty good at component level fault’s especially on Panasonic plasma and lcd sets as I found them to be good at supporting their repairers with the required info.
However the model life of sets is now only a few months as the technology is pushing ahead at such a fast clip and the number of brands being sold has escalated so the ability of any workshop to develop a working knowledge of any particular model becomes almost impossible unless you can survive by specializing in some of the more popular brands that are more likely to supply backup.
Glad now that I can now tinker away in my workshop without any customer pressure.
S
That's another problem as you say, you never see the same set twice so it's virtually impossible to be a specialist these days, valve days were much better.
Thanks for your expertise. People like yourself are helping to reduce the amount of electrical waste in landfill and saving an extortionate cost to the customer. I see many flat panels every time I go to the dump and from now on I'm going to assume 50% or more are repairable due to a tiny component.
I could do much more if manufactures brought back service manuals with schematics in .
Hi Michael,
A great video. This is what I have used to find a faulty bypass capacitor on a computer board that has a bypass capacitor for each chip.
Connect a variable voltage power supply via a resistor to the track. And slowely increase the voltage (until you are able to get a voltage reading as follows). Then use the volt meter to read the voltage to ground. And move in the direction where the voltage measured gets less towards the faulty bypass capacitor.
If the short is above 1 ohm I use the bench psu method to see what gets hot or burns up !
If you use a high enough voltage/current, it makes magic smoke!
@@mrtechie6810 or burn your finger looking .
Great vid.
I gave up repairing TV's in 2002 and followed my passion of repairing Rover 75 cars !!
Still doing it today.
Just found some RADIO AND TELEVISION SERVICING hard backs in the loft from 1960's onwards.
Threw a lot away though as museums weren't interested!!
Everyone I knwe in the TV industry has packed it in now.
I repaired a tape deck (from the early nineties) that not only had an exploded view in its service manual that explained the order to do things in, the thing also had a specific little notch to rest the new belt on while you reassembled a very compact mechanism, to finally slip the belt onto the flywheel later, and skip a world of awkwardness. That's _extra thought_ put into the most likely failures to an almost unnecessary degree - I would have managed without, just with a _lot_ more awkwardness. I love the fact that that was once the standard.
Those were the days when things were designed to be repaired and supported with spare parts, sadly long in the past now.
I think that most electronics equipment with small parts have tiny mechanical assemblies that have to be completed using special jigs. All the details have to be planned for manufacturing, but there is no financial incentive to make any of the fiddly parts re-reassemblable by the customer or a serviceperson.
In any case, due to mechanical or electrical failure with time, customers are forced to accept early failure and discarding as inevitable. And, of course, not even mentioning the failure of manufacturers to test an adequate number of units coming off the assembly line or to provide incentives to assemblers for improving the quality of the final products.
Some lovely faultfinding and explanation there. Amazing that a complex device with thousands of components can be taken down by the failure of one simple, small, common part... and equally amazing that if the flimmin' thing would only fail open circuit instead of short then it seems things would have carried on working in this case! I wish I'd studied electronics; it must be a great buzz to revive something like this that would otherwise be scrapped as the manufacturer wishes!
Just imagine how many more sets could be repaired if we had access to service data and spare parts.
Thanks, Michael! Great troubleshooting! Often I troubleshoot by looking up the make and model of the TV on the internet to see what typically fails :-) Years ago, I fixed our TV by replacing a few discrete components which were known to fail, the next TV I had to replace the bulging caps on the power supply board, but only spent a couple of dollars. For the more recent flat-screen TV's which died, I had to find used circuit boards on eBay for $30 to $40. They keep making it harder and harder to fix anything 😞
I have hundreds of used boards from broken screen TV sets but the problem is you hardly ever see the same set twice now the models change so often and sometimes the symptoms can be very miss leading and you end up replacing a board that's not faulty at all , so where ever possible I try to find the fault first before buying new boards .
I’m enjoying your longer videos another set saved from landfill pity there aren’t more people like you to save this equipment
years ago there were thousands of people like me but they have all closed down now and got real jobs paying lots of money, and it I wasn't a life long addict to electronics I would be joining them , glad you liked the video .
Great repair video with clear explanations , you're good at this stuff. I was thinking before disassembling the tv you could've just checked the screen with a flashlight and if the lcd was still working you should've be able to see the image faintly. If the screen was faulty which is your case, then you shouldn't be able to see anything with the flashlight.
Some sets has a really dark tint on the screen and its very difficult to see if there is an image even with the torch test .
Quite impressed Michael, and an analog SANWA meter too! That’s rare to see today! Rare as seeing the term EHT & filament these days!
I have always had Sanwa meters, there a very old company, as you have already noticed I'm a bit old school.
@@michaeldranfield7140 👍👏Your Sanwa is a bit more modern than the one I had! Like you I grew up on Sanwa, also a slide rule, Staedler I think, and later HP LED calculators (HP-45) in the days when you could buy brand new Mullard valves, and home kit transistors like OC71 & AC126, polythene variable gang caps and a time when car phones were enormous radiotelephones (Pye)! Tech progress has been amazing, not to mention the fall in price of high end kit, scopes, DMM etc. Best of all, being able to design & order your fully built custom PCB in a week!
Well done, as always. I also have doubts about these ceramic caps which I use in my own designs and, as you say, they break down regularly. I doubt that the stated voltage ratings are correct and I now regularly use a rating three times higher than the expected voltage. If you heat these capacitor types with just a short duration burst of hot air their leakage currents increase substantially. I do like your homemade milliohm meter.
I did hear once that these caps could damaged by the reflow process and this is the reason I prefer hand soldering to hot air, I made that milliohm meter over 10 years ago and never used it because a set of kelvin probes were about £100, I only started using it a couple of years ago when I found you could get some probes on Aliexpress for a tenner!
I repair (post 1st year warranty coverage) Amana PTAC/PTHP systems, Mitel SX-50/thru SX-2000 PBX systems, and LCD/Plasma flat panel TV's for several Pennsylvania motels, and assisted living facilities. You're quite correct, to the point that I'm of the opinion that anything built with SMD components is usually designed for a "three years, and done". Fortunately, I worked as an avionics engineer for 18 years, and am well versed in SMD replacement, and have vapor phase reflow equipment available in my shop. Between Chinese LED backlighting component availability, ShopJimmy, Jameco, and Banggood, I've fared better than 85% in the "get em running for
I have always wondered about critical life components such as avionics are these prone to failure like consumer electronics or are they built with decent quality components , one of the biggest problems in consumer electronics occurred about 12 years ago when they took lead out of solder , without the lead element a lot of chips were growing tin whiskers causing all sorts of intermittent faults, but I did hear military and medical were exempt of using the lead free solder .
@@michaeldranfield7140
You're preaching to the choir, re: lead-free solder. 63/37 "eutectic" is the only way to go!!! As far as avionics, everything goes through "ESS" Environmental Stress Screening, aka "SHAKE & BAKE", which weeds out infant mortality, and ESD damaged components. We used to specify Mallory capacitors, Vishay-Sprague, and Cornell Dubilier. Multi layer boards are my nemesis!!
Great stuff! I'm a consumer electronics repair guy myself and I'm about your age. Problem is, our job was doomed by the price erosion of e.g. TV sets. In the 70th and 80th a modern A brand TV was about 1.000 Euro what represented a full monthly paycheck for an average worker at that time. Today a TV is about 500 Euro and that's merely 50% of the average monthly pay ignoring the inflation over 40 years. So in theory a TV should cost about 2.000 Euro today and that would make repairs profitable. Besides, your insight in electronics and understanding of schmeatic diagrams and signal flow path in combination with effective SMD soldering skills is amazing and hard to find nowadays. However, I'm afraid students leaving school today are rather studying electronic engineering and get a high payed job in the industry then sitting in a TV repair shop.
I dont think anyone in there right mind will be going into TV repairs now , as you quite rightly say a TV is now cheaper than it was 40 years ago but cars and houses keep going up in price white TV s keep falling , in the 70 s TV were so expensive compared to wages most people rented ,today most people with a real job can buy a new TV for just a couple of days wages .
Also as technology advances fast it makes less sense to put money on repairing old than buying new. If one at the cost of repair gets a new bigger TV why repair. Also one cannot ignore the ease of buying flat panels. No need to organize transport. Just pick one and put in a car and you are done in an hour.
@@okaro6595 you do have a point but I come across a lot of people that are not happy just buying a new set, usually when they have only had the set for 18 months and its failed, they just dont think they have had there moneys worth ,.
Brilliant best I've seen someone talking sence,should do more videos please,talking about the problems,showing it even better..massive Respect back to my ham radio 73s...
got more videos in the pipeline , repairing things with no circuit diagram is not easy though .
Great video really enjoyed this, some great tips in it. I no longer work directly in electronics repairs but still do my own plus odd few others. The vast majority of the "TV repair" shops have now closed down in my local area, only the odd one or two left. When people ring up these places they sometimes get quoted silly money figures and most people dont take their stuff in for repair. Only the other week I fixed a small 19" TV for someone who was quoted £70 (over the phone) plus any parts for a dead fault. In the end it was just one diode in the PSU board, took me less than 30mins to fix. I charged them £35 and they were over the moon. Things are getting more complex to fix, and where possible I do tend to avoid surface mount repairs.
Even by the late 90s early 2000's suppliers were just recommending board swops, I worked in a place and we did a lot of insurance repairs and they just sent us boards out for faults.
In my first job we didn't have service manuals for a lot of stuff we fixed, and there was no internet as it was the early 90s, but stuff seemed a lot easier to fix back then, we fixed anything that came in the door with a plug on it!
£35 for a repair to a 19" tv..
There's the issue.
I've given away many 22" Tv's FOC as they are so cheap and not even worth selling..
It's a disposable world..
If we had RTR then we'd invest in bigger stuff thats supposed to last have have second hand resale value..
Where I am there is no other shops within 20-30 miles radius, I'm the last man standing, in the 80s when I opened my first shop it was a very brave move as there were repair and rental shops everywhere , in the 90 s with the event of single board TV s there was no swapping , every fault had to be to component level but now were back to panel swapping , the whole industry has turned full circle but the real truth of the matter is the manufactures don't want TV s to be repairable they just want to sell another set ,what they don't understand is if a customer buys say a Samsung TV and it only last 13 months and then is declared un repairable they are not likely to buy another Samsung so by not supplying parts and service manuals they are not doing themselves any favours.
@@michaeldranfield7140 My Samsung plasmas and LED LCD TV's from 2013 and 2015 respectively still work fine though we don't really watch TV. I watch baseball on it sometimes, and play android tv stuff on the LCD sometimes. Occasionally we watch movies on them.
Absolutely outstanding. Explanation with the electronic diagrams is just epic!
Thankyou for watching .
Great stuff. My TV had a "back light failure" on Tuesday. Turned out it was of warranty and I was told it'd cost hundreds to get the new boards in, from the distributor.
Took the TV back home, opened it up and a popped capacitor is clearly visible on the board. I'm waiting for the replacement to arrive and my TV will be working after paying $0.85 for the part.
All the talk of "climate what what", yet these corporations are creating billions of tonnes of trash each year that needn't be trash at all. Right to Repair action needs to be law in all countries and all the major manufacturers must be made to abide by it. Then we'll see a real change.
Would be nice if the right to repair took us back to spare parts availability and service manuals, we can only wait and see.
I agree, you've said it all for all of us Sir 🤞
Precisely
- Krakk3rJack
You fail to understand a number of things.
1. CORPORATIONS and CORPORATE names are always written in ALL CAPS
2. CORPORATIONS are DEAD entities
3. CORPORATIONS cannot communicate with the Living
4. The DEAD do not care about the Living
5. The only environment CORPORATIONS care about is the economic environment
There are many things you will fail to understand unless you study Law for the next
twenty or thirty years.
That is why Law is NOT taught in schools -- as it would let the cat out of the bag.
There are thins that are not convenient for you to know.
Thus common people are kept in a state of child-like ignorance and slavery.
@@michaeldranfield7140
It used to be that there were standard headlights that would fit multiple cars. Now we have aerodynamic sculptured non-standard projector crap that even _Consumer Reports_ said was expensive. I wonder with LED technology, could we require manufacturers to install "lifetime lights"? Maybe it is not so much all the morons driving with lights not working, but the manufacturers who could be to blame? Surely manufacturers can take more responsibility for safety.
It's knowing in advance the proper procedure of isolating (and the respected & expected results of each) that makes the fault apparent. Beyond that it's like a cow looking at a new gate, she doesn't know what she's looking at nor that there's any difference. The value of repairing anything isn't the saving of the device or cost of parts vs a brand new one so much....but rather, it's the repairman and his experience.
Another prime example might be using a code scanner on your automobile. It's one thing to bring up the codes, but if you don't know what they mean or what they should be......they're just codes. Great video sir. Look forward to more....and best regards from Texas
and of course years ago I went on manufactures training courses and they taught you fault finding procedures, which parts to disconnect to narrow down faults to a particular area , however training courses no longer exist , a bit like workshop service manuals with waveforms and voltages clearly marked to assist in fault finding ,
@@michaeldranfield7140 Again, I agree.. Today's technology is intended to be disposable and smaller than 'repairable by human means'. It's nice to a degree (if you're flying to Mars in a capsule), but throw away nonetheless. BTW: I really enjoy the common ground and your video. From "one gear head / lightning rod" to another...Best wishes.
"is that all it was?"... and then they expect an equally cheap price for the repair when you've spent considerable time without a schematic to find the problem. I used to repair TV's and stereo's back in the 80s/90s when things were simpler and actually had schematics. It's fun solving the puzzle, but not fun when people didn't want to pay or expected some low ball price. Great troubleshooting!
"So that's 25c for the capacitor and $200 for telling you which one it was."
@@dennisbjones When I was in the business I learned to be "economical with the truth". If customer asked what was wrong I'd say something like "do you understand how a multilayer ceramic capacitor works?" On receiving the blank look I'd say, "oh, well, never mind. It's fixed now".
customers have never appreciated how much time can actually be spend like you say tracing the 10p resistor in years gone by , but I have found most people more appreciative these day when I give them a plastic bag and say that's your old faulty part and they say what's that there's nothing in the bag , and I say take a closer look at that thing the size of a pin head, to which people say how on earth did you find that.
Sadly even doing fixes for commercial can be like that. Industrial is a little better but there time really is money.
@@michaeldranfield7140 This has been a long discussion topic between technicians and customers all over the world, through the passed years...
The (wrong) customers' opinion about the price they had to pay on a repair was based on a simple fact called "ignorance", as it is related to the nature of the repairs job itself. Especially in the past decades, they had the impression that technicians knew in advance exactly what to replace or adjust or call their intended action as you like, as soon as the customers were describing the symptoms of their faulty devices. They had the impression that the "magician will perform his trick and then ask 50$ for that magic performance, having about 5 minutes of duration"...
Of course this thinking stands on the base that an experienced technician knows his job and has faced the described problem perhaps many times before, which might be true, but the missing link here is that the same symptom may well be caused due to a different cause, or simply, the cause might be the same as the known one, but in this specific case the faulty device might be a brand new model and therefore the supposed specific experience on that one is missing. This means much more time to be spent on troubleshooting until valuable new experience is obtained...but the customer either doesn't know that or, worse than that, he is not interested to know about. He only expects the "magician to perform..."
Nevertheless the tragedy of our modern days, on one hand, is that repairs in general are dying as specific professions, while on the other hand the cheap (let them be) products cannot be so easily thrown away, because for buying new ones people need relatively much more money than the average cost of a repair.
Worse than that, the continously increasing unemployment (based on the mass and fully automated production) "erases" the existing job places one after the other, at an amazingly high speed. And the simple question is: how can one buy a (let it be cheap) new TV, when being unemployed, looking only for how to survive?" Or, in other words: "what kind of job can one do, in order to be capable to replace his (let it be cheap) TV upon its first failure", keeping in mind that there are many other priorities to be covered first, with that faulty TV to be replaced being perhaps the last one?...Let alone the environmental pollution problem, the waste on resources at the expense of the new generations to come e.t.c...
Great repair tip Michael 👍
This is the first video I came across on TH-cam.
Nice to hear from you again. I remember your articles in Television magazine.
Yep, that's me still doing the same job after all these years, I recognise you name from somewhere, we're you the rep for Charles Hyde.??
Hi Michael, I was (almost) going to abandon watching your video at 1 minute into it, but so glad that I watched and listened to your every word! Just like you, I have lost faith in buying new TV's because of the problems that you describe. I am self-taught (from books and YT), but it becomes terribly frustrating when you spend scores of fruitless hours on the same TV, realising that you lack the ability to find the cause. Most Flat Panel TVs that have been given away (to me), have been simple fixes - like Capacitor replacement of PS Board. It's the most fantastic feeling when it comes to life again! I won't entertain the Chinese 'cheapies' but like to fix LG. You are amazing with your knowledge, and it's clear that the backlights weren't working because the power supply was compromised. I am currently looking at a 42" LG with picture on the left half only. On the faulty half, just a lot of vertical coloured lines. As you say, most people simply replace the Boards. I replaced the T-Con Board, but the problem remains. Justanother one for the Tip I guess. Thanks Michael - for teaching me that little bit more. Greetings from Sydney.
Glad you liked it, older electronic stuff is far more repairable than the new junk.
A great lesson for my Sunday morning - Thank you MD. Out of interest, how long did it take you to find this fault?
It didn't take as long as it did to make the video , and as soon as I realised the backlight were not faulty its only a simple matter of unplugging things and when I arrived at the screen it can only be 2 things causing the problem COF or cap .
@@michaeldranfield7140Thanks for being Old School Michael
@@thisismyuniquestory Dont think I will ever change , I don't like this new technology throw away stuff, give me valves back any day .
Very informative thanks! I don't repair tellies as a job, but an interesting repair story to share; a neighbour gave us their old LG LCD TV that had a really blue cast to the screen, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the red and green signals were missing or it had been set up wrong or something, but upon further disassembly, it turned out that it had been run so long that the phosphor on the backlight leds had degraded to the point where it was no longer making yellow light, leaving just the blue! New LEDs now on order.
Its a common fault on LG sets , no doubt caused by cutbacks in production , if you look at a LED in an earlier model of set the yellow phosphor is held in around the edges in a plastic carrier on the newer LG sets the phosphor is just push fitted on top of the LED element and the heat from the led caused by running the backlights at 100 % causes micro cracks in the phosphor which eventually just falls off .
Great Video! I was a T.V repairman in the 1970's. I would have been pretty tempted to replace all four of those 17V bypass caps since they surely all came from the same lot and are all exposed to the same power rail. IDK. What do you think?
They tend to fail because of thermal stress - mostly caused by having solder pads that are far too wide.
Of course you are right and many years ago when sets were expensive and people didn't mind paying a sensible price for my time I would have done just that, replaced them all, but now sets are so cheap I'm working for next to nothing it's not possible anymore.
I have a Samsung TV that won't power on. Using this video, I'm going to try your troubleshooting technique. I don't have anywhere near your knowledge, but at least I may be able to narrow down the fault to a specific area. These TVs are so fragile and we've come to treat them as disposable appliances. I'd love to get mine working again.
The unplugging technique is a good start for narrowing down.
Arrived here by chance but watched to the end, what a brilliant piece of fault finding so have subscribed. When I last did component level repairs capacitors had wires 😂
Sadly all changed now , theirs not a lot of component level fault finding you can do these days without a service manual .
Very instructive! I’m confused about the troubleshooting though. The backlight died when both timing cables were attached, but ok if either one of them was plugged in separately. But replacing just one cap on one side fixed the problem. Wouldn’t the behavior mean that there was a partially-bad cap on both sides, so only the two of them together would kill the LEDs, but not each by itself?
Regardless, a very instructive and handy video, thanks! (I have a half-dozen TVs and monitors sitting in my basement waiting for me to get a chance to look at them 😁)
This is what I can't work out for myself but as there is no circuit description in the service manual I don't have an answer.
Same confusion ! Apart from that very nice and informative video ! I really didn't know that those tiny ceramic caps are "so" prone to failure... 🙂
This was very confusing in the video. Especially since it was glossed over and not discussed.
@@geraldh.8047 Maybe there is a ground or power "loop" that is only completed when both connectors are connected?
It's not discussed because there is no service manual to explain it, if I knew I would have said, my best guess is there is some control line back to the microprocessor?
Excellent diagnosis and superb explanation of how it all works. Great stuff.
Co-starring Marcus Wareing and the Jester from Leicester as a bonus.
Many thanks for watching
Thumbs up for the video, Mr. Dranfield :-) It is always heart-warming to find someone who does care and does promote repairs of simple faults.
Actually I suspect a major part of failures in modern-day electronics are of this sort: power supply capacitors, typically electrolytic, but tantalum and even MLCC are sometimes to blame as well. A TV is still a relatively complex piece of kit, but there are many smaller and simpler devices (say SoHo Ethernet switches) that are prone to capacitor failures just as well, and overall trivial to repair without a schematic, because the block schematic is very universal/repetitive. They are often used deliberately to implement "planned obsolescence" - and it's not sloppiness on part of the board designers, it is intentional and it is an art in its own right, only noone admits this on record, for obvious legal reasons. In reality, I doubt that the orders for this do not come from the board of directors of the corporations involved.
I'm fine with a leaked capacitor that I can simply replace. What infuriates me are "design sabotages" that cannot be repaired, such as mechanical design details that result in a destructive failure, not repairable by a glue gun and duct tape: a ball bearing on a name-brand lawnmower high-RPM electric motor, seated in a plastic housing, where the large injection-molded plastic part is a major structural component of the motor assembly, not available for replacement... or a fragile plastic hinge in the microphone arm in an expensive name-brand headset (earphones + microphone). This kind of thing should be sanctioned :-)
In TV's and PC monitors, notebook PC's, fondleslab telephones and many other devices, repairability gets outright precluded by mechanical design that (almost or literally) prevents disassembly, or if you disassemble, prevents plausible re-assembly. Such as, TV chassises made of plastic that hold together by a myriad fragile flippers that are intended to snap together, with no clear way to get them un-snapped if repair is needed. In the way of repairability, I'd love to see some improvements on this front = easy access inside, to get my hands on serviceable parts - be it individual boards, or backlight LED stripes or whatever. To replace some popped caps, in the PSU, you often don't even need a schematic.
One particular brand though comes to mind, that *does* make board-level schematics still available in service manuals: the Vestel of Turkey. To those who are not in the repairs business, this company makes on the order of 50% of the cheap flat-panel TV sets sold on the European market by various "household names" (that no longer run their own factories to make electronics). I.e. many of the EU household name TV's sold in Europe share the same motherboards, power supplies and principal inner mechanical construction. I've noticed small differences in the component sets soldered on boards, such as a protective Zener on a motherboard (Vestel T816 PVR) to protect the mobo against the +5V PSU output going fuzzy as the elyt caps dry out. One brand did have the zener, the other just had an empty position... On the first box, I did exactly that "find a short on a PCB" analysis, as explained by Mr. Dranfield in this video :-) and then I replaced all elyt caps in the other box preventatively.
Unfortunately, genuine repair techies, able to diagnose and repair small-signal electronics, are a dying profession. In rich countries, kids don't get to play with a soldering iron anymore. I know several old bards, say born in the fifties or older, who have experienced a great part of the history of modern electronics on their jobs, and keep their "ethos". I myself was born in 1976 and I was possibly lucky that I spent my childhood on the eastern side of the iron curtain, so I got my hands dirty and I was able to pick up some DIY skills from the old bards... Nowadays, the trouble is: consumer electronics is hardly worth repairing anymore. Industrial electronics still is, considering the cost of replacement (including various "strings attached", such as software licenses). As for consumer electronics, the problem is in the flip side of the "economies of scale" - in mass manufacturing and global mass distribution. It just got so efficient and cheap, per unit, at that scale, to produce and distribute new pieces, that a repair of individual random pieces just cannot compete. Repair takes too much human attention, and it takes a *skilled* techie who can diagnose microelectronics, at least at the level of power supply rails and proper general troubleshooting. Consider how much such a professional needs to earn, net pay per an hour of work, in a modern-day western country. Multiply by three to allow for taxes and similar costs and some profit for the employer company. A repair of a cheap TV set easily just does not pay off in a rich country, considering the amount of skilled work required. Even in my post-commie home country, where wages are still relatively low, I can venture to repair my own cheap stuff in my free time as a hobby, but noone would pay my employer for me to do that same on a commercial basis - because buying a new one is just cheaper.
In private, I delight in removing the more trivial "planned obsolescence sabotages" and giving my devices a new lease of life (often immortality, in the sense that moral obsolescence comes earlier). Sometimes I even go so far as void the warranty on a new gadget (after a quick initial test), "pop the hood" and look for the obvious culprits inside - cheap elyt capacitors and the like. And I remove those sabotages on a new device, before it had a chance to fail. E.g., I've had a cheap SoHo WiFi AP run for about 10 years in my parents' house, before some third party scrapped it for his commercial reasons (and out of technical ignorance). I do this in cheap Ethernet switches that I'm using in-house, and do not want to remember where they're located for the next 10+ years. Solving an emergency (device outage) that occurs at random is just much less convenient than preventing a failure (planned obsolescence) as part of initial deployment.
Speaking of capacitors, for the record, for innocent and excited tinkerers to come: when replacing leaked or suspicious elyts, note that you should *not* take capacity (microFarad) as the only or even a crucially important guide. In power supplies, the capacitors typically have to sustain a high AC current (and pulsed at that). There are a special variety of wet elyt capacitors for those positions, called "low impedance". And don't just rely on those words in a catalogue, do actually take a look at the Esr value and the permitted ripple current (two sides of the same coin). And, compare. You will notice how vastly better the Solid Polymer capacitors are in those respects, compared to "wet" Al elyts. When refurbing elyts, I strongly prefer solid polymer to a wet elyt. Unfortunately, solid poly doesn't work at high voltages. So the primary side of a mains PSU has to be fitted with a wet elyt. Speaking of quality wet elyt, remember Panasonic FR and Nichicon CS or CY. And Nippon Chemicon in general, but I won't suggest a particular model/family. With wet elyts, brand does matter (not so much with solid poly, especially when replacing wet elyts).
Also, be aware that while most elyts nowadays are in power blocking positions, some may still be used for analog timing or signal filtering - in these positions, you'd better stick to a legacy wet aluminum elyt (choose a quality brand and model) or MLCC if the size and voltage allow. (And, keep the original capacity.) Solid polymer tends to have a higher leakage current that might hamper timing or filtering applications.
In some rare cases, you may notice that after replacing a wet elyt with solid poly on the secondary side of a PSU, the PSU's regulation loop becomes slightly unstable - maybe just within a certain range of loads. The PSU starts to whistle. That's bad luck - it happens due to the significantly lower Esr of the solid poly or MLCC that you used for replacement. The lower Esr has improved the Q of the regulation loop, thus promoting some resonant pole... Hardly ever a problem though.
Your comment about Vestel supplying circuit diagrams is the reason I have always liked vestel sets but recently I have noticed they have stopped publishing schematics for the latest models and this is very worrying especially as vestel make a lof of the TV s in use today.
Great Video Michael Me and My Mate Bought 2 Identical 46 Inch Samsung Tvs About 5 Years Ago From Sainsburys Mine Failed Just Outside The Guarantee Perod Of 15 Months I Bought Another Samsung tv This Time 50 Inch I Had Nothing To Loose So I Thought i Would Have a Go At Fixing Mine Turns Out it Was 3 Faulty Half Sections Of Led Strips Bought Them Of Ebay And To My Suprise it Fixed The Set Told My Friend To Run His Back Lights at 50% And This Prolonged His Set For a Couple Of Years Until His Failed He Bought a New JVC Set And Give Me His Old Set For Parts So I Again Thought I Would Have a Look At His Old Set This Time The Back Lights Were OK But i Had Traced a Fault in His Power Supply a Short/Circuit Mosfet Transistor Bought One Of Ebay And This Fixed The Set So Now I Have 2 Working 46 Inch Samsung TVs !! p.s. They Dont Tell You To Turn Down The Backlights To Prolong The Life Of The Set When You Buy One Do They !! Just Subbed To Your Channel Michael Regards mike.
Most of the sets I get in for repair have the backlights set full up, I think they come out of the factory like that to give the best picture, all this hype about Led lights lasting 100,000 hours is just rubbish and it's not just TV s, I have led lights at home but they don't last 5 minutes and any money you save in electricity is just wasted again on buying more led lights!
I've been repairing electronics for about 9 years now. It only took trying to fix one TV before I entirely wrote them off and stopped offering repairs on them. You can absolutely spend enough time trying to do component-level diagnosis, but it is honestly like finding a needle in a haystack unless, as you say, you are just very lucky.
The one and only TV I ever did a repair on seemed to be a faulty power supply. I knew enough about electronics to be able to kinda tell what I was looking at, so I probed around for some kind of standby voltage, was unable to find anything anywhere. I found a replacement power supply board for about $90, tossed it in, and it started working just fine.
The problem? Used board, not new. No warranty or anything. That power supply board _also_ died, and I was then out $90 since I had no clue how to properly diagnose the board to find the fault. I of course did poke around quite a bit, desperately trying to find what might be responsible for the failure, but I couldn't find anything obvious. If only there was some kind of diagram, or a schematic if you will, that could have told me what component values were supposed to be!
In the interest of "saving time", you are basically forced into throwing complete fabricated parts at them until they start working again. Normally I would be okay with this approach, _IF_ the replacement parts actually had some kind of warranty or were at least reasonably priced.
I find it _incredibly wasteful_ that this is the approach things have taken. Swapping out a board is fine, I get it, that's so you can get something repaired and working as fast as possible. But why replace a whole fricking board if the issue is a burned zener diode or a shorted decoupling capacitor? These components cost like 12 cents, probably even less, and can be easily replaced with even the cheapest of soldering equipment.
Some may argue that the reason service manuals and the like have gotten far less useful is because "the electronics are just more complicated now". I don't think that is true at all. What I found most interesting about this video is that early 2000's service manual looks EXACTLY like the service manuals for modern Samsung phones. There's diagnostic flowcharts, oscilloscope readings, etc, all these things to follow for the specific fault you might be experiencing. They have them for phones, which are objectively FAR more complicated than a TV. There is absolutely no excuse.
the whole idea of not supplying any service manual and only replacement boards which cost as much as the set did when it was brand new is of course just to sell you a new set , manufactures are not interested in repairs any more , as soon as the warranty expires the thing is disposable ,
Use external power, start putting power in and check where zhernobyl is. You could use temp cam or just melt that problem ;)
Apparently some people spray rubbing alcohol on, see it evaporate around the component. A non-contact thermometer could work, or a finger on components.
yes , this is what I do when the short is above 1 ohm and I cant use a milliohm meter to look for it .
@@gblargg I used the finger test on roms on pc `s years ago
I found Chernobyl, but it is radioactive.
This is just an excellent video. It shows one reason for the precipitous decline in TV repair. The other reason is TVs are much less expensive than they used to be. I have been doing TV repair for 46 years. From receiving tube CRT TVs, to solid state, to plasma, DLP, LCD and OLED TVs. All of the US manufacturers of TVs like Zenith and RCA are long gone. Most of the Japanese companies have left the business. It is an extremely competitive business with the Chinese in the market. The manufactures don't want the sets to fail for the first 5 or 6 years because that makes the customers mad. They make the screen fragile. So a broken screen is the most common problem seen. They price the screens so they are not economical to replace. They run the LED back lights so they fail early. Access to the service manuals is limited. And as this video shows if you can get a service manual it is almost useless. There used to be SAMS Photofacts which had detailed schematics for almost all TVs. The manufacturers marketing strategy is clearly to not have TVs repaired. TVs could go back from commonly being throw away to repaired if a enormous TV repair database was available and schematics and component parts were readily available. Note: in the video there is not an explanation at 11:55 as to why plugging in the ribbon cable from the faulty board by itself did not cause the back light to shut down. Thanks again for this great video even if it was in a foreign language.
Its not just limited to TV S now , its virtually impossible to get spares for anything and service manuals are no longer exitance , its all part of the plan to just sell a new set unfortunately , and it doesn't seem to matter how much you pay for something , its still not repairable when it goes wrong, the reason there is no explanation about the ribbon cable is because I don't know , without a service manual , technical description and schematic diagram its impossible to say and without this a lot of these faults are found by accident and just pure luck rather than down to skill I'm sorry to say.
That was the best down to earth fault finding video I have ever seen. Well done sir. I only work at the level of "replace the board" but even that is often not possible because I cannot find matching part numbers.
Without component level fault finding you would have had to replace the screen in my set as the board the cap was on is part of the screen and not replaceable.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Exactly what I was thinking. Replacing the T-con board wouldn't have fixed this, so you'd be out the money for that and no closer to a solution.
Or worse when numbers are scratched off.
Thermal Camera might be able to see the Cap getting hot as it is shorted and acting as shunt (generating heat)
A lot of circuits now switch off the supply when they see a short but it would be possible to apply power from a bench power supply and see what heats up .
Very well explained I have a 2018 50-in Philips flat screen one side of the screen darker with Lines but still has a picture I would love to know what is causing that we need more good men like you
A darker side of the screen usually indicated failure of the backlights, but darker with lines could indicate a COF chip failure on the LCD panel itself which is not repairable .
NICE WORK!
Hi from Phuket - Thailand - Expat Australian here...
What a coincedence! I saw the preview and marked it as "watch it later" for no reason, just to broaden my knowledge.
Next thing I go outside to throw garbage and found an (almost) working 60' smart tv that someone left.
Now, after watching the video, I opened it up
And it had EXACTLY the same problem. ))
This is getting to be quite a common fault on lots of different models , not just samsung , glad I was able to help you .
Thanks for this great video. I enjoyed your calm commentary on the “service manual” and learnt some new fault finding techniques.
Many thanks for watching.
I do electrical and electronics work on cars. I had a Suzuki Swift with no instruments on Monday. This also turned out to be a faulty ceramic cap. Diagnosis was really easy, it had burnt through the supply track! New cap and a piece of tinned copper wire got it going again.
These caps are very un reliable and as you have just pointed out used in many different electronic things now , not just TV s .
By far the best video on tv repair I have seen on you tube, Liked and subscribed. Cheers from Ireland
Than you for that, seems like I put on another 500 + subscribers since I made the video, I wasn't expecting it to be that popular now we're in a throw away society.
Thankyou for sharing this knowledge Michael. Let's hope things change for the better with regards to repairability of products in the future as it's a sad state of affairs when so much tech ends up in landfill when the repairs could be reasonably straightforward.
We can only hope and see what happens
This is useful information.
Had a Samsung tv that I got from a customer. The tv will boot when one side of the panel is disconnected from everything else.
I did follow the procedure that you mentioned and found that one of the ceramic capacitors had full resistance (no continuity). However, the other capacitors had similar (around .452) amount of resistance and did not decrease as I got closer to the bad capacitor.
A bit more trouble but if you cant determine which cap is faulty you could always take them out one by one .
@@michaeldranfield7140 That's useful but I'd rather trash the tv than to do that.
Really enjoyed the video Michael ... My I could have learned so much from someone like you in the day thank you sir good health....
I was a lot better at repairing stuff years ago when you had service manuals and access to spare parts, now its just about board replacement in most stuff so you never learn anything.
Good diagnostic skills Sir. I would like to mention though, that MLCC technologies are NOT unreliable. Most of the issues with these parts are due to the design engineer failing to comply with the ripple-current rating and/or using the capacitor with a steady nominal voltage across that is greater than 60% of its rated maximum voltage.
When correctly applied, these two basic rules will ensure a far longer lifetime than classic electrolytic capacitors.
I once heard that the re flow process and cooling can cause micro cracks to appear on the device leading to failure later down the line but don't know how true it was.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Yes Michael, SMT fractured end-caps can be a problem. But this is absolutely not the fault of the SMT device. It is nearly always about handling and reflow process during assembly. There are rules to follow to avoid such, and they are not always...
Further, the flexing of a PCB can cause similar problems.
So yes, the physical design is almost as important as the electrical design. This is what we deliberate as engineers to try and ensure such problems are avoided.
As to reflow heating and cooling, YES, this can be a problem. Nowadays, the temperature profile of a product can be much more finely controlled - even differing for separate regions of a PCB. So these issues should not exist if all parameters have been properly estimated and entered for the product's journey through the reflow oven.
B.T.W., I have watched many interesting videos published by Louis Rossman in the last year or two. Good luck to him and you and all those who campaign for Right-to-Repair.
Nice video. Made it super easy to trace a fault in a 75in just laying around. Now just need parts bin
instead of ordering every time.
Thats another problem I have , one of the very last parts suppliers left has a £7.95 plus VAT charge for delivery under £200 so just a cheap chip can end up costing over a tenner.
Marvelous exposition and a joy to watch!
Many thanks for that .
Bloody brilliant! usually those pesky T-Con boards die but this just shows those tiny caps are very unreliable
MLCC caps are the most common problem of the T con board .
That's great tutorial you put together. Rights to repair is a must, more over with the chip shortage and inflation it would become economical to repair and not throw.
We can only wait and see what happens.
Excellent video, I’m just glad I’m now retired from repairing tv’s and electronics.
Its no longer easy money repairing TV sets like it use to be .
You are a top notch technician. I work as a TV repairman too and I have found those to be shorted as well and saved a few TVs. I have a little different method of finding the short. I take 2 D batteries and apply 3 volts DC and see which one reads hot on my infared thermometer I wonder what causes a Samsung to power cycle from a bad panel?
Without a service manual and some proper technical information its not possible to know for sure what causes the power cycling, one can only guess.
When a short is over 1 ohm I use a bench power supply and just see what burns p as I dont have a thermal camera.
Fabulous informative video.
I would pay more to have a repair culture as opposed to throw away remit.
Could not agree more with Michael and having watched some of his previous vids I will be enlisting his expertise service.
I think most people would pay more to get a quality product like we were use to many years ago , unfortunately these days paying more money does not guarantee better quality , someone brought me a Smeg toaster in for repair , it cost £130 so you would have thought this was a quality product , especially when you consider a toaster can be brought from Argos for £15-£20, however it was no so , made in China and no parts available to repair .
I enjoyed watching this. I made a good living thanks to capacitor failures, mostly electrolytics though MLCC failures increasing as time went on. Whenever I go to the tip I feel it's sad to see so many TV's piled up for scrap even though many of them are repairable. I used to repair Samsung CRT monitors and it was a luxury to be supplied with full service information and tech support on the phone. Their CRT's had a short life. I recall one particular 14in monitor range that suffered from strange EW correction faults that would disappear when you started scoping the circuit. It was an obvious design fault, a capacitor coupling to an op-amp input with no resistor to prevent DC drift on the input. Strange that ever got through vetting.
I know , I hate going to the tip , saw a vintage TV set one day and offered to buy it but the guy on the tip said no way.
that annoys me too seeing all those tvs at tip and the fact they won't let you take them as i am sure 80% of them could be repaired. I used own a small tv repair shop but got out of the trade when the Chinese started to flood the market with cheap unrepairable junk with no spares or service back up also as these were so cheap people wouldn't pay to have stuff repaired people don't realise that most of the time of the repair is in fact diagnosing the fault as fitting the parts generally only takes a small part of the total repair time and then you try to quote the customer for the repair they often say "its only a small part why does it cost so much " I used to avoid giving free estimates as a lot of repair shops used to do as the customer will take what you estimate as the final price and unless you are prepared to work for free ie diagnose the fault before agreeing a cost to the customer so you put all the effort and find the fault often actually repairing it to confirm the diagnosis before giving the customer the price of the repair only for them to say "No that is too much" and un repairing it as often the customer wanted the item back unrepaired. i have in the past quoted a high price for a repair when i could see either the fault was a particularly difficult one to repair or the customer appears to be an awkward person hoping the customer would decline only for them to give the go-ahead for the repair. as with any business the business would be a lot easier if we didn't have to deal with the general public!!. Another thing the manufacturers do to make their items not repairable is not making the firmware or the programmed microcontroller available as a spare part. I recently watched a video by a channel called Mend it Mark in which he was showing the repair of a receiver made by a relatively high end manufacturer in where the receiver ended up being scrap as the fault was the main microcontroller which wasn't sending a signal to the main amp to power up as the manufacturer didn't supply the microcontroller this rendered the machine unrepairable.
Great video. Your explanation was so uncomplicated. Thank you.
many thanks for that .
Great video. Ceramic caps do fail. An easier way, if you have the budget is to use a thermal camera.
Force some current trough the faulty supply rail. The defect cap or semiconductor will show up easily.
I use the voltage method when the short is over 1 ohm, I don't have a thermal camera but I have burnt my fingers a few times looking for a hot cap.
Thermal camera is a brilliant bit of kit for finding shorts (causing the PSU to run hot) or high resistance (component runs hot). Best bit of kit I ever invested in. Saves hours of methodical trial and error narrowing down the issue.
Excellent job Michael, shows that knowledge and perseverance can pay off. Thanks for the interesting video.
Glad you liked it ,many thanks for watching .
Great job,having this technique is very helpful to me,. I'm from the Philippines. Thanks for sharing this video Sir.
No problem , glad you liked it ,thanks for watching .
@@michaeldranfield7140 thanks for replying to me Sir.
Another TV saved from scrapping and such a satisfying repair.
Just a shame I cant save more sets, people seem to prefer to take them to the tip .
@@michaeldranfield7140 I agree. It would help matters if manufacturers gave proper service detailed manuals as you have already pointed out. I think that's a contributing factor for some of the huge e waste these days. Plus the rising costs of repairs, engineers time fault finding V's the price of a new TV.
Great bit of troubleshooting. Haven't done a flat screen, but I've fixed XBox game console just by the old-fashioned "close visual inspection" Found electrolytic cap bulging. So often it's a part that's just a few cents, but of course your time and trouble to find the fault is a bit more than a few cents.
Close visual inspection is sometimes all you can do without service data but as you quite rightly say a lot of problems can be diagnosed by inspection alone .
@@michaeldranfield7140 I remember one time amazing a co-worker by pointing confidently to a chip on a board that had maybe 40-50 chips and saying, "That's the failed part." At first he was awed by my expertise until I pointed out to him that half the chip had 'exploded' and flown off leaving just a shattered plastic package. lol
Great video
Am learning more from these in Kenya 🇰🇪
Many thanks for that .
Very good, I wish I’d seen your vid last week, my 7 year old tv went black but with sound and I bought a new one and they had the old one back for recycling.
Don't bank on your new set lasting 7 years, quality is well down.
Great troublshooting! :)
I found the use of the milliohmmeter very interesting. I just retired about 2 & 1/2 years ago from my position as a production debug technician for a manufacturer of very high end computer hardware; some of the PCB's that went into these systems could cost as much as $40K! - And just like this FV, could be brought down by a shorted power supply buss rail bypass cap; only in this case, there were potenitially HUNDREDS of them!
We did have a device similar to your milliohmmeter, but it produced audio tones to indicate the severity of the short, in use it was often inconslusive. A methed we DID develop was using an FLIR camera to look for shorted components. In practice, a power supply that had variable current limiting was connected to the shorted supply rail. Prior to connecting the power supply, its output voltage was set to equal the normal supply rail voltage. The suppy's variable current limit control was intially set to minimum; then the supply was connected to the faulty supply buss rail, on the load side of any fuses, bypassing them. The FLIR camera was set up & adjusted to show the board as it looked "cold"; then the power supply current limiting know was gradually cranked up. Typically once we increased current past the 1 amp mark, the shorted cap or other component would start to "glow" on the FLIR camera. In addition to shorted caps or semiconductors, the FLIR camera would also locate solder shorts or internal inter-layer PCB shorts (the latter obviously unrepairable, it meant the PCB was automatically scrapped). In most cases, we would find the short in 5 minutes or less (vs. hours or DAYS by any other mehod!). The FLIR camera was expensive (@ $8K), but it quicly paid for itself!
PS: "FV" was a typo, meant to say "TV"! ;)
Yes this is the method I use when the short is above 1 ohm but I dont have a thermal camera, I use my nose to detect roughly and then the burnt finger technique to pinpoint !
Interesting you should mention the internal layer pcb short , I had one of these a couple of years ago on some high tech equipment which would have made me a lot of money if I had managed to fix it , I was passing 10 amps into a pcb with a short but it was the pcb heating up , not a component so I concluded it was an internal short in the board itself and I had to send it back un repaired .
Brilliant! Not sure how you knew that unplugging various ribbon cables would give the light on or off result, but I guess that is why I don't repair TVs . :) Amazing deductive reasoning. I saw soomeone diagnosing computer boards by powering it up and then putting some alcohol on the components. If something had shorted out, the component would dry off faster than everything else, and he would replace that component. Electronic grade isopropyl alcohol.
with no technical description on how the circuits operate which was usually printed in the workshop service manual fault finding is a little bit of knowing what your doing and a lot of good luck .
Excellent video, perhaps it is an idea to explain to viewers why we always pull the plug each time rather than use a switched extension !
A tip I was taught when I did my microwave training was to unplug and then place the plug inside the oven cavity where you can see it and no one else can accidentally plug it in, safety.
Showing the (tiny) faulty component to a customer can lead to raised eyebrows at the bill - even when the repair is a small portable device... small part, small charge expectation. Back in the day a new PL509 or mains dropper section seemed worth the money! When we boosted tubes and read 'Television' magazine!
So true and with modern sets all parts are small, the only exception is when you replace the whole board. I would rather go back to the times of real component level fault finding which no seems to be a long distant memory now, line output valves are still useful for making valve amplifiers though!
At least some manufacturers still keep testpoints on boards with some minor information like what voltage should be there. Sometimes even this tiny amount of info helps a lot.
true, any little can be a big help .
My career was in radio telecommunications starting with thermionic valves, moving on to discrete transistors, then the first integrated circuits and finally entire stages in a single chip controlled by computers. By that time, the only moving part was a switch on the kit to power it on and off, and a few cooling fans. As time passed, the service manuals got thinner and thinner, culminating in self diagnosis systems that just gave the number and location of the faulty daughterboard. So from component diagnosis and replacement, to just "pull out a board and chuck it" in just a few decades.
That's exactly how the TV industry has gone now but the problem is new boards are so expensive its usually cheaper to buy a new TV , I had a samsung few weeks ago , not long out of its 12 month warranty , a new board was just over £180 , the set only cost £229 brand new .
Nice clear analysis of the fault. Bugger hard without the circuit diagram though. Good job!
I know what your saying but when I narrowed down the problem to the LCD panel there's only 2 things on the panel that could cause the fault, either a shorted cap or shorted COF.
Sir
congratulations on a great video and a beautiful and thorough explanation
No problem, many thanks for watching.
I had a Sony 55 inch that the picture went out on exactly like this one. I took it to my local repair shop (now out of business because he retired) and he had replaced every board in it and the picture would still not work. Now I've got a better understanding of why. Unfortunately all Sony was interested in was the Play Stations and I couldn't get any tech help from them. I now own an Element TV made in the USA all except the boards but it has been working great, it is a Roku set and I am very pleased with it.
always a problem without any service information , trying to decide if the fault is caused by a board or the lcd panel itself .
I am a TV technician. So yes, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find some failures without diagrams. But the fault you show is a known and easy to find.
I know it's a very common and easily fault to find with the equipment but the video was to highlight how easy it is to make a wrong diagnosis as the back light lit whichever of the T con ribbons were removed which would lead some people to assume the main board is the problem when it's not.
I fair enjoyed that! That's cheered me up enough to put my old LG's motherboard in the oven. Say a prayer...
Don't overcook it plastic parts melt very easily!
@@michaeldranfield7140 I spoke to a guy tonight who said that "dielectric oil" might sort the solder problem. Sounds odd to me (WD40???), but I'll do some more research. Not mad keen on the idea of an oven without a temp reading doing the biz.
Thank you very much Michael, you are a fount of knowledge. I would not have known how to find the faulty cap on the cof strip using the milliohm meter. That is one to remember! Again, many thanks.
milliohm meter is not something you use every day but a very useful device when looking for a short circuit and it saves mass disconnecting of components connected to a common supply rail.
Got a flat TV for free where one segment of the panel was dead. Fault was easy to find, one of the COF cables delaminated. I was even able to find a replacement on AliExpress, but as said in the video you need some fancy equipment (an ultrasonic soldering machine). So even when you know the fault you're often not able to fix it without special tools. Scrapped the panel and sold both boards (CPU and SMPS) for about 80 € on eBay.
Panel failure is a very common problem now , much worse than when I made this video , Samsung's are the worse, dreadful sets .
MLCCs are "not very reliable" is a bit meaningless without context. They are far, far more reliable than any wet cap. They do however experience torque fractures which shouldn't be an issue in 99.9999% of use cases and usually shows up pretty quickly. They can crack over time, I'm sure with large heat fluctuations, but if you looked at the device failure rate due to them and then counted how many of them are in each device you'd quickly see they are one of the most reliable caps, with single layer ceramics probably being the most reliable.
Who needs a service manual when you have genius diagnostic skills like this :)
I'm currently trying to fix my TV irrespective of the cost. So far I've changed 3 boards, numerous ribbon cables and now looking at a 4th board... D'oh.
the problem is you may change all the boards only to find its the screen and not a board .
@@michaeldranfield7140 Thanks, Michael ... 45 years ago, I got a TV repair licence but never used it. How things have changed. TH-cam is an endless source of help (Thanks to gentlemen like you). I'll keep trying. Gives me something to do in my retirement :)
It's good to know that people are still doing these type of repair what do you think about led to remove the most vulnerable part with is the screen that stand a chance to break. can't manufacture do better on designing of removal of backlight.
I think the Led back-light sets are bad, I have had sets only do 3,000 hours before the led s have failed, we have led light bulbs at home and they don't last 5 minutes either, the 100,000 hours quoted lifespan is just total rubbish, it wouldn't be so bad if the LEDs in a TV could be replaced from the back without having to remove the fragile LCD panel but all these things are just done to make people buy a new set unfortunately.
I took in several TVs and repaired them with a simple elimination method. Try to determine which board is faulty and replace it. The last one I did was a curbside rescue, and I ended up replacing all three boards, but it only cost me about $55 to do so, and it works fine. Guess I got lucky in a way...
On some cases it's very easy to miss diagnose a main board fault when it's atcually the LCD panel causing the fault, as in this case.
Very interesting, nice fault finding. I've used a bench power supply to find shorts like that before. I must say I miss working on flat panel TVs like a hole in the head!
I know what you mean, far better working on vintage stuff but unfortunately flat panel is the future, I use bench power supply to see what burns up when the short is above 1 ohm and milliohm meter won't do.
@@michaeldranfield7140 Exactly, in other words is when you get for or five of these capacitors connected in parallel right next to each other
I know you don't like flat panel TV sets but have you seen how many views this video has had, might be worth considering if you are getting paid by TH-cam?
@@michaeldranfield7140 Hi Michael, the money is so poor these days it would hardly be worth my while. Between 50c and a euro a day. A video like this on my chanel might do £10.. I don't have the space for the flat stuff anyway. Thanks though, and it's great to see you getting the recognition you deserve.
I am so glad to come across your channel, Sir. I watched your video and was delighted to watch you explaining and troubleshooting methodically. You have excellent content in your video which is very educative and very practical in nature. I liked and subscribed your channel. After that I looked at the list of videos you have published in TH-cam. The topics you have covered in that list indicate that you are a genius and you selflessly shared your knowledge via TH-cam. I understand that it takes a lot of preparation to record, edit to make it presentable and publish in TH-cam. I have lot of respect for your knowledge, experience, teaching style and mindset to do good to others. I have learnt a lot from your video and planning to put into practice as learning electronics is my dream for a long long time. Hats off to you, Sir. I wish you long life so that viewers can enjoy your videos and learn from them (already you have a very long list of TH-cam videos). I will go over some of your videos and learn from your experience. Best of luck, Sir!!!
Super knowledge and determination to id the root cause Michael. Easy enough to replace the cap if one has right one and the equipment. Lot of TVs binned have very minor issues. World probably needs to address this massive problem. IMO It creates a lot of environmental and recycling issues. Problem is repair eng costs tend to be high and they dont guarantee they will fix the TV and often advise buy a new TV. Many flat screen TVs have known design weaknesses too eg the clear thick plastic LGP Led Light Guide Plates ) cracking or difficulty to buy replacement and / or replacement diffuser, light amp sheets and prisim sheets if they get contaminated. Many TV also fry the LEDs and repair is as easy as disassy then replacing the blown backlight leds or led arrays. Good fun fixing them if you are an interested hobbyist electronics or TV person with necessary equipment and can source a few spare parts etc .
One of the biggest problems I tend to face is getting hold of spare parts , most manufactures only supply whole boards and I would say 90 percent of the parts sold on the internet are either fake or have been pulled from old boards and made to look new again , its not unusual for me to spend as much time looking for a semiconductor that is real as it is to find the fault.
What an awesome video. Thanks.
Disposable electronic devices today for no need.
I really like you troubleshooting skills....
Not much demand now for my trouble shooting skills unfortunately.