TV doesn’t work My new 55 inch 4K TV which I just bought a couple of months ago. I’m looking into a blank screen of blackness. It just stopped showing a picture. I’ve unplugged it and plugged it back in.
My Visio screen will go completely off if my DTV is just playing music (pisses me off, it used to display artist/song). A long shot, but just try changing the channel away from music.
At some point, we had turned the sound completely down on the music (probably for a phone call) and had what looked like a basically a dead system.
Did you maybe change your settings by mistake with the remote (i.e., HDMI port or something)? Or video source?
Any lightning happen around you?
Do you still get audio?
Did you pay the cable or dish bill?
when I walked in today, I thought the power was out. I live on the 2nd floor, private entrance, and the light for the stairway is not working. But everything else works, and the TV has power
If you press the menu button on the remote control for the TV, do you see stuff? If you do, the problem is likely with the cables or the video source. If not, there may be a problem with the TV itself, perhaps the screen.
Pretty much any TV made in the last decade will display a “splash screen” when it is powered on.
If you unplug the TV, plug it back in, and then turn it on, do you get any image (usually a logo) on the screen?
If not, you have one or more of:
- Bad backlight
- Bad logic board
- Bad power supply.
Leave it unplugged for several hours to completely reset it. Some electronics need time to do a complete reset.
Excellent first step. A surprisingly percentage of time it’s something simple like the wrong Input being selected on the remote.
However, if the TV just won’t come on at all then it is overwhelmingly likely to be the power supply. Outside of physical damage to a flat panel TV, this is the most common problem.
The good news is that replacement PSes are readily available, not that costly, fairly straightforward to install, etc.* The bad news is you do all that and it turns out not to be the PS at all.
- I did this last year on one of my TVs. It had been randomly turning itself off (a PS red flag) and then finally wouldn’t come back on.
Working again. Unplugged it last night.
I’ve got a Samsung TV that I suspect has a bad power supply. Nothing happens when you turn it on, the red LED blinks 7 or 8 times in a row, repeatedly. Is this really something I can fix myself? I called a local place several months ago that does TV repairs, and it was going to cost a couple hundred bucks just to diagnose, plus whatever else it would cost to actually fix it.
Lookup “blinking light codes” for your model. The number and frequency of the blinks usually indicates which board(s) is/are bad. Some are cheap and easy to replace. The T-Con (TCon) board, whatever it does, is a common board that goes bad. The catch is that the issue may not be a single board.
Unless itʻs a high end TV (unlikely since youʻre balking at the cost of fixing it), itʻs probably better to just buy a new, possibly larger set.
Not all that hard if you are careful all the way. (E.g., start by leaving it unplugged for several days. Put face down on something soft. A bed works well. Unscrew the back off. Etc. The boards are connected by plug connectors and such. No soldering.)
But, as we’ve pointed out, one issue is that this might not be the right or sole bad board. So you have to be prepared for that.
For a brand like Samsung, replacement boards should be easy to find on eBay. There, look for “pulled from working TV” or some such at least. “Tested” is even better. Seller rep is everything. You can get new boards from suppliers but they are going to cost more.
Mrs. L.A. bought a 60" Vizio a few years ago. We noticed the screen had a blue cast to it. I noticed the blue was in a mottled (I called it ‘cloudy’) pattern. I took it in to be fixed last month, and the TV guy put in a new control board. He said as soon as he turned it on, he could see it was still blue. He said the screen was bad, and there was nothing he could do. I replaced the Vizio with a 65" Sony a couple of weeks before Christmas. (Mrs. L.A. didn’t say what she wanted for Christmas, so I bought ‘us’ the Sony as a present.) Neither of us have had a TV screen go bad – CRT, or LCD. We’ve decided Vizio is not a good brand.
So now we have a virtually useless TV sitting in the storage shelter. The TV guy offered to take it to recycling, but Mrs. L.A. said, ‘I don’t want someone else making money off of it.’ sigh I assume there’s a local recycler, and maybe they’ll give us a few bucks for it. But for now, it’s just taking up space.
Thanks for the info. It’s been unplugged for months, so no worries there. And I did take the back off of it once, but had no clue what I was looking for. If it’s just plugging boards in and no soldering involved, I can probably handle it. I’m sure there are plenty of YouTube videos I can watch.
In my experience recycling a half a dozen TVs over the last two or three years, not only will they not give you money for it, you will have to pay to have the TV recycled. If the TV guy offered to recycle it for free, you missed an opportunity.
Hard to make that determination on a single case. I have two Vizio TVs, both bought from Costco. The first has been trouble-free for about 5-6 years. The second was DOA and I got Costco to exchange it. (At first they didn’t want to and said I damaged it, but I returned it the same day I bought it and I argued with the MOD about it.) Vizio is an economy brand, so the quality of my 55" Vizio that I paid $450 for will not compare to a $1500 Sony, but it’s a great value for the price.
Vizio got into the US market big time via Walmart and such. It was selling TVs cheaper than the old name brands. Now, there were several other cheap brands in that market segment almost all of which are crap. But Vizio did a better job on QC than those and sort of stood out. Even Consumer Reports was impressed by what you got for your money.
Just keep in mind that’s compared to the similarly priced brands. Not to Sony and such.
(Note also that LG used to sell junk electronics under it’s old brand Goldstar. LG rebranded itself and upgraded the quality of its products. So not all junk electronic sellers are bad at all times. Similarly, some of the old name brands have degraded. Esp. the US ones like RCA.)