When Samsung LCD TV's Go Bad

Over the last 6 months, our Samsung 40" LCD has declined to work properly. It worked, but you would turn it on, hear clicking sounds until it finally turned on. The time to turn on has slowly increased over time. When it does come on there were blue dots were all over the screen.

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As you see, even the cats watch TV at our house.

To temporarily fix this we would just turn it off and on again and it was ok to watch. Since it seemed to be getting worse I looked into fixing it.

I found thousands of people out there with the same problem. One thing they all had in common was the 1 year waranty was up and Samsung basically said "Screw you" to most people who asked for help.

The problem is a group of capacitors on the power board. For some reason, the capacitors "wear" out, the tops bulge up, and even some of the black electrolyte fluid leaks out.

According to a consumer affairs site "Samsung installed 10 volt 1000 micro Farad capasitors on a 12 volt bus of the power board."

After looking at our TV, we found all four 1000 uF capacitors were dying and fluid leaking out of the tops.

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My thinking here is that I have three options:

1) Repair it myself for about $12 plus any soldering equipment I needed.

2) Buy a new power board for $100 from a place like http://www.partstore.com/Default.aspx .

3) Have a certified repair person fix it for who knows how much ($200 to $400 is common).

So, after some great information on the problem and a great YouTube video from a guy who shows us all how to do it, I was ready to fix it myself or blow up the TV trying.

Video Part 1 , Video Part 2

I removed the power board, heated up and removed the old capacitors, then soldered the new ones into place.

After completing the work and putting the TV back together, we tried it out...

It works! No clicking. No abnormal lag time to start up.

I'll keep you posted if it catches on fire.

Next time I think I'll buy a Sony.