Plasma TV Issue

[chasineyes]

Hey folks! Last night about 8 my Samsung plasma lost it's picture. From what I've read, it's either the capacitor or power board. Both are "relativly" cheap. Anyone ever experience this???

[Swiftswamper]

I've had a roommates plasma go down but he never had it fixes. LED is the way to go

[delcecchi]

  chasineyes said:

Hey folks! Last night about 8 my Samsung plasma lost it's picture. From what I've read, it's either the capacitor or power board. Both are "relativly" cheap. Anyone ever experience this???

How comfortable are you doing this sort of repair? How old is the set? Can you really get the part(s)?

Those would be the first questions I would ask myself. Then I would consider how to test the power before spending money on a part. A multimeter should be able to test the outputs of the power card, if they are accessible.

(Is the service manual available on line? Or in one of the big books at the Library?)

[Whoaru99]

Never done it, haven't personally seen it on a TV, but I have heard of it and have fixed other things with bad caps. Probably a batch of counterfeit caps snuck in. That's been known to happen every now and then.

Digikey or Mouser almost certainly has what you need in those small parts. The power board you might have to buy from an authorized service center/parts supply place. Their HSOforum should list the service contacts or just Google around.

The other thing is, how old is it? If you bought it with a credit card you may have an automatic extension of the warranty.

Oh, and FWIW, plasma still has the best picture to me, at least until you get into the 4k and OLED sets, anyway. Gonna grab me a new Panasonic plama before they stop making them. The one I have has been flawless with 7,438 hours of use and counting, but looking to upgrade to a 60 or 65".

[delcecchi]

And which Capacitor? There are a bunch of them in a TV, even a digital job like that.

I'm not even sure how to get one of those things open to access the power supply. If you can, you should be able (maybe) to probe the power supply voltages and see if they are what they are supposed to be. A digital multimeter would do the trick for measuring. Probing might be a little tricky unless they were nice enough to include some test points or the connector will let you at them.

Also, everything is probably surface mount, just to make it more interesting.

[chasineyes]

A little follow up...So I popped the back panel off and started looking at busted capacitors (apparently they will "bulge" if they pop. Didn't find anything there. Then I started doing some youtube searchs and boy oh boy are there videos on fixing TV's. What I found is I can order the power board ($35) the X board (35$) and the Y board (35$) unscrew them and put some new ones in and try it. Now for the good news!!

In my eager to tear soemthing apart, my wife says that night...I THINK WE HAVE AN EXTENDED WARRANTY!! Sure enough we do, and when I called Geek Squad they said they would bring the 3 things I was going to order and try them out on Monday. Apprently this is a HUGE problem with Samsung Plasma's!

[Whoaru99]

  delcecchi said:

And which Capacitor?

The ones that are bulged, leaking, or have completely spewed their guts.

And, SMD isn't that bad unless they're the super tiny ones. Even SMD ICs aren't too bad with the proper technique. Don't even need particularly special tools, assuming one already has basic electronics repair tools. Chipquik works wonders...