Video to highlight the problem of repairing flat panel TV sets 

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 RU-vid 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! :-)

30 year Aircraft Avionics Tech here. This is the about the best example of Troubleshooting I have yet seen on RU-vid. Nice to see a fellow Technician fighting the good fight against engineered obsolescence. Cheers form the U.S.A. !!!

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

This is the clearest and best explained video on RU-vid. No nonsense or rambling, just clear and concise explanation. Excellent work 👍🏻

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.

It may only be as simple as a faulty tiny cap. but finding the faulty cap is the hard part. Thats why these type of videos are so helpful to someone getting into the industry, or even a hobbyist.

My hats off to your sir. As a retired TV repairman, you have my respect! It is nice to find someone on RU-vid that actually knows what they are doing. That meter you made is a lifesaver when it comes to troubleshooting shorts.

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.

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.

This is by far the best fault finding tutorial regarding modern TV's on RU-vid. Thanks Michael for some critical tips that can greatly reduce going down rabbit holes.

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.

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

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.

Wow. When I was a young lad I used to deliver TV's for a local company. They had several engineers working in their repair shop. I thought things seemed complicated back then but the modern stuff seems even worse. One old guy called Norman used to work on the old valve sets & knew all the tricks of the trade. Including polishing scratches out of the tube with Brasso. (Mostly Philips tubes no matter what brand TV they were) Then the Japanese took over & only B&O were better. People used to ask me why do you need 100 channels? When we only had 4 to watch. (If you were lucky) most still had 3. How times have changed. You should be a tutor pal. Your video was excellent.

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.

NICE WORK! Hi from Phuket - Thailand - Expat Australian here...

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.

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.

Excellent troubleshooting presentation, just the "old school". Thank you for sharing. My respects from PR.

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.

Excellent real-world fault-finding and diagnosis! I once had a remote control that had a ceramic cap go short. It was for one of the early Freeview boxes, namely the Netgem iPlayer (nothing to do with the BBC service). Drained the batteries in no time!

One of the reason I knew that my days as a bench engineer were numbered was that it was cheaper to buy new machine than repair the old one ..also I don't really want to be a board swapper !!

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!!

Thanks for this great video. I enjoyed your calm commentary on the “service manual” and learnt some new fault finding techniques.

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!

Great video! Especially liked the clever way to single out a faulty capacitor, thanks for the lesson!

Absolutely outstanding. Explanation with the electronic diagrams is just epic!

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...

Great interesting video. I enjoyed it very much. I remember how great service manuals used to be and enjoyed watching you show the differences. Miss the quality of the old service manuals.

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

Great Video,.. and explains just why the manufactures don't provide full schematics of their TVs,.. they just want you to buy a new one!!

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.

It really chaffs my ass when I can remember working on sets that had the full parts and schematics inside the back cover. I can even remember vaguely my mother taking me down to the repair shop to buy a new tube for less than a candybar. Trouble shooting the tube types was easy, just look for the tube that doesn't glow and isn't hot. 5 steps forward on technology, 10 steps back on sustainability.

Great video Michael and very informative. Ive repaired countless flat panel sets myself but have had absolutely no formal training other than the occasional youtube videos. With that said I’m lucky to still be alive! I do pride myself on not damaging a set any further when I get one in, and not having a set go out to its owner that would be a safety concern. Ive only had one set come back to me and it had a rather abusive owner. Other times I’ve spoke to old friends or acquaintances and they will tell me a story of how I repaired their tv, or playstation, or cell phone perhaps and that its still going strong years and years later. Often times I can’t even remember doing their particular repair since Ive done so many. Mistakes I’ve made, well two come to mind. #1 Never touch a heatsink to check for heat in order to tell if a component is being powered up! I had a plasma tv shock the daylights out of me once when I learned the hard way that some heatsinks can be live. #2 Never replace certain components without first realizing what may have caused them to fail in the first place. Other than watching your components fail you may actually pose yourself a safety concern as I once did when I simply replaced a pair of resistors without finding its fault and the new resistors exploded with what looked like a bolt of lightning that extended a good 12 inches or so out of the rear of the set. I tell you I could have cracked a walnut with my butt cheeks right about then but thankfully the good lord above spared my life and my shorts to say the least. As a hobbyist the hardest part can be locating the components Id say. Cross referencing has its limitations as well as you sometimes end up with cheap Chinese clones that can be very short lived. I wonder if the capacitor wizard I use would have been of use in your repair Michael, although I’m not sure it will do ceramic capacitors but it does test in circuit so for that aspect its a good and fast tool, on the contrary so are my eyes and my nose. I really liked the comment you made at the end of your video when you said what your customer might say when you present them with the fault. “Is that all it was?” Some people clearly don’t realize or can fully appreciate the expertise that a technician today must have in order to repair electronics at the component level. Board level is far too expensive and a waste of materials in my opinion. Prices on TV sets have come down so low these days that it’s not as common for people to repair them sadly, and the technicians are fading away as well it seems. I still search for my place in life out there. For reference I’m 45, USMC Combat Veteran as an 0811 field artillery deployed to Iraq in 03. a licensed general contractor in California for over 10 years, have 5 children all with the same mean lady classified as my wife of 16 years, and Ive worked as an AV technician for about 8 or 9 years. Been out of work for awhile since the pandemic started, and feel weighted by depression and the struggles of home life, most of which my wife creates in my opinion, but we all know life is hard and no body cares so I better save it right! Anyway great video Michael and thank you for sharing it with us. Take care bud.

My job is as an electronics diagnostician. Liked and subscribed. Cracking video. A word to folks who fancy a spot of TV DIY… if you are not a professional or well versed in electronics, this level of diagnosis is best left to qualified folks. They are more likely to repair your TV and charge a modest fee. You are more likely to accidentally damage something and end up having to buy a new TV.

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. ))

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.

Brilliant video, thanks. How much I agree with you, I was also used to repairing down to component level. I started off in the early 1960's. I progressed through from 405 -line TV' s then into the birth of the 625-line uhf & the dawn of colour in the UK. As engineers at that time people like you & I were kept very busy! I moved off into Broadcast Television engineering, until very late in my working life. Very technical & enjoyable it was as a career. However after a series of redundancies & nearing retirement, I found my way back into part-time domestic TV repair mainly Samsung, but also other makes. We had little access to service manuals, or spare parts, so I used to go online to download the various chip data-sheets & using a sort of 'reverse-engineering, work out how the various chips were interconnected etc. to aid fault-finding. Long-winded, but it worked. In the current 'green' climate, where there is supposed to be a 'repair culture' perhaps expensive domestic kit such as TV's etc should now again, be made more repairable, with spares & service data once again more available.

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 😂

I've really enjoyed watching this video and it will help me a lot in case my older LCD won't start up anymore! Thank you very much!

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

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.

As an old tv repair man, it's really refreshing to see, today's throw-away society no longer tries to fix anything. I do try before I give up.

Great repair tip Michael 👍 This is the first video I came across on RU-vid. Nice to hear from you again. I remember your articles in Television magazine.

I have spent 55 plus years in the repair field, and I was astounded by the lack of support and parts availability for the sets here in the States in the last 15 years or so. I am glad I am retired from the repair business. Even if one would get a "tested" board from a "recycler" who said their boards were tested and worked" I often had to repair the replacement board. Even "rebuilt" boards were most often bad. They never even scrubbed the dirt & dust off of them. Just pulled the boards from a junk set & shipped them without testing. What a scam! I generally went to the component level for repairs on the flat screen sets, but when a power surge hit the sets, it often burned the power supply board, badly charring it beyond repair.

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 😞

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.

You make a very good point “is that all it was!” Had that experience!

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.

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!

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.

Amazing and fascinating. Well done finding and fixing that problem. You obviously have a comfortable knowledge of what makes these gadgets work.

"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!

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.

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’m enjoying your longer videos another set saved from landfill pity there aren’t more people like you to save this equipment

Fascinating Michael, you’ve amassed an amazing amount of knowledge to enable such a repair. The lack of appropriate service information is obviously an attempt to encourage the purchase of a replacement item. In fact it wouldn’t be impossible for manufacturers to build in a fault code display system similar to that used in CAN bus automotive systems.

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.

Quite impressed Michael, and an analog SANWA meter too! That’s rare to see today! Rare as seeing the term EHT & filament these days!

Excellent job Michael, shows that knowledge and perseverance can pay off. Thanks for the interesting video.

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.

A great lesson for my Sunday morning - Thank you MD. Out of interest, how long did it take you to find this fault?

Fantastic video! I'm no electrical engineer, but I am fascinated by fault finding.

Absolute Genius. A process of elimination a perfect example of how to fault find

Nice. Reently seen the opposite level of damage here where a failed mains bridge repair was attempted by the owner who tried to stop the fuse blowing by wrapping it in al-foil. Needless to say, the entire input section of the power supply was 'toast'. Samsung service manuals haven't impressed in some time. Every TV seems to have different connections and timings for no valid reason or I'd stock up on boards from dead screens regardless of model and just swap them in. They should learn a thing or two from PC board makers. (PS: wouldn't it be nice if the led boards screwed in from the back or slid in sideways without the need to remove the screen from the frame. Just sayin. )

I had one of those 1990s Samsung CRT sets, very good TV in my experience, dirt cheap but totally reliable. It's amusing that folk waxed lyrical about how the MLC caps would revolutionise reliability as against the electrolytics, yet they're probably the number one cause of "dead unit" failure now, the games consoles are notorious for it. And of course it's impossible to know by looking at them if they're from a reputable factory, making the problem worse.

You're doin the lord's work, sir. Keep it up!

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.

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?

Use external power, start putting power in and check where zhernobyl is. You could use temp cam or just melt that problem ;)

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

Excellent diagnosis and superb explanation of how it all works. Great stuff. Co-starring Marcus Wareing and the Jester from Leicester as a bonus.

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 😁)

BRILLIANT! I love your mili-ohm build you did. Very nice. What do you think about the other method of finding the shorted part? That is, disconnect the 2 ribbon cables from the timing controller, then with a power supply set to 17V and amperage adjusted to zero, insert the 17V into the 17V rail on the LCD strip. Using a thermal camera, gradually bring up the amperage (very low, of course) just enough to cause the shorted part to start to get hot. With a good thermal camera, the offending part should pop into clear view. What's your opinion on that? I'll tell ya, after getting my thermal camera, it has saved so much time in troubleshooting. I wish that I would have had that decades ago when this was my career. LOL Great video, so well thought through. As for the lack of schematics, I find it annoying and painful. I'm old-school and back in the day, I had a full library of schematics for every make/model of TV I repaired (and other equipment). Fortunately, I'm not longer in the business, but trying to find schematics for other things that I want to fix is pretty much impossible. Or worse, a company sells a "schematic" which is NOT a schematic, but more a blowout of SOME circuits. We have a Panasonic 3D Plasma TV and I got lucky on that. I was able to find full schematics with parts list, which came in handy a couple of times that I've had to fix this beloved beast. LOL

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!

Marvelous exposition and a joy to watch!

You Sir rock to the max! I learned and subbed. A 12 yo laptop is my TV but my friends will have the big TV. A little better cap would make customer happy but they want you to buy a new TV. Bring back the service in service manuals!

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.

Thanks for the video. I'm an old hand at repairing CRT TVs but been very nervous of flat-panels. You've given me more confidence. BTW, the customer says "Is that all? How much do those cost then? 20 pence? Why have you given me a bill for forty quid, you ripoff merchant!"

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.

Much respect for you here Michael, nicely done.

Great explanation. I used to do TV repair a long time ago but even I could see the end when flat screen tvs came along. As a career it was not going to be a challenge just replacing a whole board instead of component fault finding.

Excellent tutorial on chasing down a short with a milli-ohmmeter, thank you

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.

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.

Well done! Thanks for the practical fault-finding demonstration.

Really enjoyed the video Michael ... My I could have learned so much from someone like you in the day thank you sir good health....

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

Methodical and logical troubleshooting to the point of faiulre. That was lovely to watch.Cheers !

By far the best video on tv repair I have seen on you tube, Liked and subscribed. Cheers from Ireland

Building a micro-ohmmeter that is sensitive enough to diagnose the resistivity of the copper traces is pretty amazing.

Nice logical fault finding process, clearly explained!

that is disgusting from manufacturers these days. Absolutely disgusting! I fully support the right to repair agenda!

Great video, I wish I saw this earlier, I could have saved my Samsung. I did all the steps you explained, but not the capacitorcheck. Thanks for sharing!

Great video. Your explanation was so uncomplicated. Thank you.

Thank you great video it just shows small things cause big problems. It was nice and informative to see your methods to get at the problem.

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.

Great video Am learning more from these in Kenya 🇰🇪

You tell the customer "that was the problem, that little thing right there", lol. That was funny, it's so true that people would not understand all the trouble to get to that little capacitor causing the problem.

Brilliant!! Clear explanation, good fault diagnosis. Thanks for information.