... 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.
ReplyDeleteMy brother (15) and I (13) cut out Color TV repair skills on a 1955 RCA color TV with a remote (which we didn't have but built one). 24 tube (plus the big one, of course, a 21CYP22A picture tube) for the main chassis and 13 tubes for the remote control chassis!!
DeleteThat monster took 550 watts of power, BTW - we used it as a space heater for mom and dad's room!
Ah, vacuum tubes and clunk-clunk turret tuners! Thems were the days...
I 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.
"I am a Ham Radio operator, since I was 12. I am now {84}, and I also used to fix tv's... " for my folks' family and friends - for cash; usually just had to replace a tube or a condenser.
DeleteWe (me and my buddies who were hams or about to take their test) used to go down to the town dump and pick up old radios (and if we were lucky a TV) for parts and aluminum for chassis. Then, after we had saved up enough money, we went down to Radio Row for a tube for the final and an old receiver (WWII or Korean vintage).
"Those were the days..."
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.
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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.
ReplyDeleteOuch. Unfortunately, the only way I know of to avoid that is pure luck. The reviews you see are pretty much always written in the first few days with the product. No matter what the percentage of bad ones is, someone is getting bitten by it.
DeleteSceptre used to make pretty good/cheap computer monitors.
ReplyDeleteThe reason the smart tvs are so cheap is that they are subsidized by the spying *cough* data collection. Vizio brags about it in their corporate materials. The others all do it too. If you are going to use a streaming service thru a box, I still think it's a good idea to minimize the 'attack surface' and use one box on a neutered smart tv. In other words, don't put the tv on your network, don' t use apple, roku, amazon, and one of the chinese open source boxes all together. Pick one you can live with and use it.
Even sony got into the spying game with google TVs at Costco. Even though I turned off the networking and mic, and declined all the "services" they will still periodically pop up a message about not being connected, and how much better your life will be if you let it spy on you...
The off brand tvs are also built to a very low standard. The traces are as thin as possible, as are the boards. The power boards are commodity and built with crazy cheap, marginally spec'd components. The connectors internally for ribbon cables have very low insertion times, and thin or no plating on the connectors. The very fine pitch for chips and traces means any dirt or corrosion will take out a board or chip.
That said, there are only three boards inside. Input/main board, power supply board, and TCON. No power usually is the psu board, lines in the image are usually corrosion or dirt on ribbon cables or bad TCON. Try cleaning the ribbon cables and connectors first. For most TVs either psu or TCON is around $20-30 and an easy swap. If it solves the issue, you've saved $300, if it doesn't you are only out the time and $30.
We tried the $350 TCL tvs that Costco was selling at my client's house. We have replaced 12 of them now, usually before the 3 year extended warranty ran out. I did have two this year that made it to 6 years, and I have one still in service with one year left (that was one of the warranty replacements.) It is a challenging environment, with high humidity, poor quality power, sometimes lightning, and a couple get a whiff of chlorine occasionally.
That said, the Vizios died but were fixable. Samsungs kept running until we went to higher resolution. The TCLs fail after a few years, and now we're giving the Costco Sonys a chance.
My personal feeling is that it's not very "green" to build consumer products to fail early, and encourage people to replace rather than repair. I'm not willing to 'eat the bugs' or take cold showers as long as the macro economic incentives are for waste.
If you really want to avoid the spying, look for a monitor designed for commercial use, either in a control room, or as digital signage. They will be rated for 24/7 use, have much higher quality components and design, and of course they will cost more. Planar makes some nice units, as do the big Japanese companies. Often they are available used at significant discounts.
nick
On smart TVs: Vizio makes more money selling data than selling TVs. Walmart didn’t buy Vizio to sell TVs, Walmart wanted that sweet, sweet customer data to use and to sell.
ReplyDelete