Many of us misspent our youth fixing televisions. But fixing a 1970s TV is a lot different than today — the parts were big and tubes were made to be replaced. Have you torn into a big flat screen lately? It is a different world, as [The Fixologist] shows us in the video below.
The TV in question was rescued from a neighbor who was about to throw it away. If you are like us, you’ll watch the first few minutes and see it powers up, but the screen is very dark. Back light problem, right? No problem. But it turned out to be more than we thought.
Honestly, we assumed it might be the power supply, and we would have put a power supply on the LED leads to test that first. That would have been smart because taking the panel off to reveal the LEDs was very difficult! There were two bad LEDs, though, so in the end you’d have had to do it anyway.
We were disappointed that after fixing the LED, he cracked the LCD panel during the reinstallation. So, in the end, this was more of a teardown video and not a repair video. He seemed to think a lot of the tape in the unit was to thwart repairs. That could be, but we wondered if it made manufacturing the TV easier which, after all, is mostly what they care about.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard people tearing into a TV and wondering if the factory was against them. We’ve considered it, but we are pretty sure it isn’t the case.
Love the boro style patch on your jeans!
They are all doing it in some fashion and there is no need
We have shared some of our TV repair experiences and are relating to this guy +++
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CySYBQXvyaP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
If the back plate were removable, the LED repair would be trivial.
I’d drill holes in the back plate where the LEDs poke through.
You’d still have to remove the main board to get to the LED strips, but removing the panel without any kind of picture degradation is very difficult.
My company would also be bankrupt in 2027.
Dont really agree with YT authors conclusion about deliberate anti repair practices in this TV. Reality is quite mundane, glues is simply cheaper than designing clips.
As for the repair fail? crap happens, we learn from it and get better. Failing at something is the quickest way to learn new skills. Only people who dont fail are those who dont try.
Next time he will know to
– do it on the table, not the floor/carpet
– living room is not conductive to panel repair, hair/debris trapped inside makes you do whole thing again, ask me how I know :)
– be more careful / have some extra hands to help
– leave panel facing down or have a jig supporting panel evenly (multiple suction cups)
Absolutely agree, almost nowhere wastes effort making stuff hard to maintain when 99.9% of consumers just throw stuff away when it fails even if itβs just a blown fuse.
But places do is not bother making repairs easy – because almost no one can be bothered to repair stuff – and optimising for cost and manufacturing.
Things can be repaired, just nobody wants to pay the repair price when the new one is better and cheaper.
That’s the very sad fact of modern day electronics. Youtuber STS Telecom just made a video pretty much amounting to this – technical repair shops are going out of business as the devices are getting more complex (i.e. takes more time) do do repairs compared to previous generations, but at the same time they are depreciating at a greater rate, so if you’re quoted $300 for a repair to your 2 year old Iphone, financially it makes little sense.
In a similar vane, you’ll see ‘written off’ vehicles being transported to lands where labour cost isn’t really a factor compared to the value of the vehicle.
I repaired a flat screen once.
Could have bought 2 better ones with earnings in the same time. Won’t do that again.
To do a not shitty job you need a cleanroom. Not opening a hard drive clean, but cleaner then your kitchen. Can’t use a cleaner bag and can of air (to make a redneck glovebox) like you can with something small.
Also: One of the light dispersers glued to an LED will fall off after you complete the reassembly.
Also also: If you don’t know for sure what’s wrong and already have the parts, you will be stuck with a disassembled TV. The most fragile inconvenient thing to leave around the house.
I’d switch a car from slushbox to real trans again before I would fix a TV again.
It’s a constant BS theory that things are glued together to stop people repairing things when the reality is that it makes assembly faster, cheaper, more reliable and in a lot of cases (EG phones) doubles up as a seal keeping dirt & moisture out.
Also, given that most TV’s these days are so cheap as to be disposable it is hardly worth anyone going to the trouble of repairing one even if it was a super-repairable model.
Did a similar repair of my 65in Vizio where sections of the LED backlight went dark. At first I was going to replace just the bad LEDs as Brad did but worried the brightness would not be uniform, or other LEDs would fail later and did not want to go back in again. The Vizio design is not much different than the HiSense.
There were repair videos + LED repair kits available and opted for a LED kit for $70US. I made the repair on a ping-pong table and used a pair of tile suction cups to remove the LCD screen. The repair was successful and still going years later.
Had few other unrepairable TVs due to bad electronics but always fun to take apart and salvage the plastic light filters and PCB assemblies for parts.
The LCD without the display part and the liquid crystal part is a good start for a workbench lighting solution. It has the mounting screws in place, and it provides bright, white light from a wide source (no sharp shadows). Now throw a bed sheet over the workbench and you have a quick-and-not-so-dirty photo background for documentation (switch off the soldering iron beforehand, and temporarily remove the thing to be photographed while applying the sheet).
For sure! I’ve one at both shops fairly large. One is just edge lit slim piece of aluminum that runs for the timed on which is a bath of light in the bath. The biggie here is getting them to stay on thanks to gov’t meddling (energy star). A lot of 4K’s go to a slideshow and thus stay on. Then a monitor sized strip under the shelf above the home bench and two midsize screens on the ceiling as well, it’s the best light ever! Get ’em while you can OLED’s won’t do this.
To keep them on you need a 1k pull-up resistor between one of the hdmi input pins and Vcc. Can’t remember which pin off the top of my head.
Have done a handful of these repairs myself in the last year. The smaller the tv the easier the job, as I did exactly what the author did and cracked the led panel on a 65″. I do not replace the led strips, I just jumper around the dead LED, as the ones I’ve seen have shorted open when they died. I do believe that the display LEDs being in series, and the strips being tied together, make the TVs disposable commodities, not the glue holding them together,
My parents had a TV die, and at first glance it appeared to be the power supply for the back light. However after playing with it a bit, I discovered it would turn on the backlight for a short duration, and then turn it back off. Poking around, I found the control signal for this and it was in fact turning the back light off, not the power supply shutting off. Since it was a controller or firmware problem, and unlikely to be easy to fix, I just used a resistor to pull that line high, and the backlight remained on. It’s been running that way in a workroom/home office for a few years now. I kind of expected something else to fail, but it seems to be fine with my hack. It’s stuck at 100% brightness regardless of the menu setting, but that hasn’t been a problem.
How do I determine the type of LED individual bulb/bead/light/lamp to replace? Aliexpress has all kinds of them, with different wattage, and even volts. The writing on the actual aluminum strips in the TV is cryptic. (I get the dimension part, like 3030). It looks like a bad idea to try and reclaim old beads/bulb/leds/lights after heating them up and lifting them off…it’s kind of crazy how many LED tvs are dropping out of the skies like dead birds. My apartment is filling up with them, and they seem like an easy repair. I bought a whole set of replacement strips for a sony xbr55x900e from shop jimmy, but clearly not new, and about 6 LEDs are out (they refunded money, no need to return, etc). So, still caught in the lurch. I’m stuck. Missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.