... to have our Month of WTF??!!?? that I talked about Friday. Two of the things that bit the big one this month are a small one, our bedroom fan, and a big one, our TV. The fan is still limping along on its replacement, our hurricane prep fan which runs on either Ryobi "One+" 18V batteries or the 120V outlet (AC), and I haven't gone looking for a replacement, yet.
The TV, though, is a big one. Last Sunday night, the 15th, the TV was on and everything was normal. I left the room for a while (it was something like "Fast and Furious 28") and the set had a sudden loss of picture quality - darker and just "not quite right." Colors are wrong as well as brightness and contrast. Over the course of the next few days, I tried to research this sort of issue and tried to see if there was something I could do to fix it. The old TV was a Hitachi “48 inch class” HD set (an inch class means the diagonal dimension of the display is plus or minus 1/2 inch from that size- which means, in turn, it's sure to be closer to 47-1/2" than 48-1/2") and I found the date we bought it in my old checkbook. It was July of 2017, so the set is 7-1/2 years old.
I started out in electronics as a hobby at around age 12, and once I could
work on things without killing myself, I used to fix TVs. This was in the
vacuum tube days, back when the corner drugstore would have a tube tester near
the front of the store, so I have some time working on TVs. Everything I worked on was a black&white TV, but I fixed a few of those including some with fairly involved problems so it wasn't all replacing bad tubes.
Last time I had a TV that needed repair, I just bought a new one. That's how we got this Hitachi set. So after a couple of days poking around trying to find ideas on how to fix it, we decided to see what a replacement costs.
I suppose it's not a bad time to be shopping because everyone is claiming some
sort of "special deal" on TVs and it's a matter of finding something you
like.
After a couple of days of looking and a couple of days deciding, we went to pick up a Roku smart TV. While I started out completely opposed to a smart TV due to privacy concerns, we've been driving TVs with a Roku streaming device since about 2003 so it's not like we're going to get exposed to a whole new world.
Screen capture from the online ad at BestBuy.
The part of the ad page that I edited out was the part describing my options. I could (1) go pick it up in the store, (2) go to a designated parking space and have them bring it out to me or (3) not leave the house and have them deliver it tomorrow. I went with #1. Getting the TV running and all of my services playing was pretty easy, took around an hour, and inconveniences were few. Those mostly involved walking to another room to look up something.
Getting the 33% discount shown in the ad is a pretty good starting point and the Hitachi we replaced was smaller and quite a bit more expensive when we bought it in '17. Add to the "smaller and more expensive" that the higher price didn't include the Roku streaming hardware, that brought the cost of the older setup even higher. It makes this set seem like a pretty good deal.
Actually, SiG, another way to look at it is to consider that a complex product like a TV has become a simple commodity - it breaks, you drive to a store and pick up a new one. As well as how much better this one is than the 13" black and whites of the old days.
ReplyDeleteI am a Ham Radio operator, since I was 12. I am now 64, and I also used to fix tv's of my own. But like you, I have found that most modern electronic items are not worth fixing, since I can't work on them with all of the digital stuff and the chips that have been made so small and so filled with the things that they do.
ReplyDeleteHeck, you can get a transceiver on a chip now, at least a QRP one. And many of the HF units are now DSR so they can do more than ever.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
My main station rig is a Software Defined Radio, based on a 16 bit A/D converter, and the big advantage of that architecture is it eliminates or dramatically reduces intermod, because they don't have the biggest source of nonlinearity in a receiver- the mixer.
DeleteI wanted to get my ham ticket somewhere around 12 or 13, but couldn't swing getting a radio for around another decade. I was 22, in '76. So I'll be starting my 49th year in February.
Shortly after moving here in 2014, our Vizio LED HD TV was zapped by a lightening strike (among other things!) I had a new TV ordered when I decided to investigate replacing the boards I assumed were the issue. I found them with help from Google along with instructions on how to do it. Cancelled the new TV and followed the instructions. Much to my surprise, it worked perfectly when I plugged it back in. It's still working fine today.
ReplyDeleteThat said, you got a great deal on some newer tech.
Coincidentally, I just read an article about how challenging it is to buy a dumb TV. Selection is quite limited. I can't think of any reason I'd want a "smart" TV. I very rarely watch OTA TV, so my main use is movies on Blu-Ray, and that's very infrequent. My old TV still works, but has a minor display issue, which developed over months of sitting there without being turned on.
ReplyDeleteTurns out, it's also tough to find a Blu-Ray player with a built-in OTA receiver, other than weird brands such as "Lonpoo". Such would enable using a big monitor instead of a TV, which would suit me fine.
73
I almost went down that rabbit hole because half of the time I spent looking for the TV was looking for a dumb TV. That was partly for the privacy issues and partly for the fact that the dumb TV should be easier to get working. It's hard to get much easier to setup than this one. I found a decent-looking TV from a brand I'd never heard of, Sceptre, but I just never got comfortable with the idea.
DeleteThis one has an antenna for OTA TV (SHTF TV) like the one that died, and I haven't hooked up the antenna yet. That'll be today.
The 'smart' TV is 'smart' only if connected to your network. Otherwise, works as a simple monitor to play DVDs, or to use your own streaming device, or OTA antenna (most still have a connection for that).
DeleteI was a SatComm maintenance Tech in the military and have fixed a TV to live beyond the time it should have a couple of times. The last two flat screen TV's lived only a couple of months past their warrantee.
ReplyDeleteI hope you don't get a dud one like I did. Its ~3 years old and needs the main board replaced - the display, however, is fine.
ReplyDelete