Hi guys,
I'm really glad to have found all this really useful information on how to fix TV's! It gave me the perfect excuse to go out and buy a new soldering iron.
My 2 1/2 year old Samsung 40" 1080p LCD TV decided to crap out on me on new years day, as pointed out to me by my boys at approximately 6am. You can only imagine.
I decided to carry out the repair myself and armed with a list of capacitors, phoned my local Maplin store. They assured me over the phone that they had the 'all the capacitors in the world' in stock. My TV was carefully disassembled, the PSU board was removed and I drove the 60miles to go and get my 7 radial capacitors.
Sadly, they had no capacitors in the 105 degree range I needed, so I left fairly miserable, figuring that by the time I'd ordered components and had them delivered mail order, the TV would likely stay knackered until the weekend.
As a last resort, I phoned the Samsung care line, on the bank holiday Monday. Imagine my surprise when they agreed for an engineer to phone me within 2 working days. Tuesday morning, the service centre duly contacted me and a pair of engineers arrived on Thursday the 6th January (yesterday) and carried out a repair in the home before lunch. It took approximately 10 minutes, and they simply replaced the entire board - for free.
On the receipt, they describe 'replacing 4 capacitors' in a range that my particular example doesn't actually have (4x16v 1000uf), but what the hell - my TV works now and it was done gratis. The work is guaranteed for 3 months.
I'm vaguely annoyed that I didn't have the satisfaction of repairing it myself, but thanks to this site, if the PSU they supplied ever decides to spew all it's capacitors, I shall take great delight in soldering in quality items from RS.
My EEPROM had no issues at all, so I should imagine it's only the unlucky few amongst us that need to reset it. It's also my understanding that should your EEPROM be corrupt, Samsung engineers will not be able to carry out the repair in the home.
[EDIT] Just thought I'd add, even though the work was being done for free outside of the warranty period, I didn't exactly want the Samsung engineers getting the impression that I'd taken the TV apart myself to inspect the PSU. Just in case. There's no point giving them an excuse not to carry out the work.
For that reason, I was very careful not to munch up the screws or give any indication that the TV had been 'tampered with'. Ahem. I even used a permanent black sharpie pen to make the screws look good as new -tee hee!

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