Dell W5001C power issues, sound without picture problem and some other thoughts

Below is a request from a potential customer and my response to it.

This time it is not the usual customer complains, I promise.

The email, I take it, points to an earlier post in this blog, where the issue is also mentioned...but I figured I'd post the question and the answer anyway.

After all other professionals deserve to know what we think about them...and maybe even that we tend to sometimes admit we might be wrong...

Question:  How much to send in what ever boards for you guys to fix?  I turn the power on, and it takes 3...4...5  8 mins for it to boot up.  Then the tv is fine for hours and hours.

The Caps look good, but like you said maybe they are out.  I read a few ppl that posted after they did the fix you told them they get no picture now but sound and high pitch sound.

So how much and what are the odds you can fix my issues.

Thanks,

Another DELL Suckka

Kevin

Answer:

First off, Dell has very little to do with all this.

Like most American brands these days it's just a hat over an Asian company. In this case - Samsung.

The few ppl who have picture but no sound have a completely different problem (probably this one), which is the actually the even more common issue with those TVs and is more expensive to fix too; it is completely unrelated to the delayed power on.

What you describe sounds 100% like bad capacitors. It may be the ones from the post, it may be different ones...it may even be capacitors not on the power board, but on the main board...because there are ones in both places and they actually even do the same things...so there's always chance that it may be the other ones that have gone bad...and there are quite a few of them too.

But, statistically speaking, you can't go wrong starting with the ones the article talks about.

I know that's what I'd do before investigating anything else.

Working in TV repair industry for a while made me rethink my opinion of doctors who tell you bunch of seemingly useless stuff to do whenever they see you.

I mean if you see 50:1 ratio of problems with certain syndromes it is only natural - a sign of intelligence, in fact - to expect that the every new case with such symptoms will carry the same cause and therefore be treated the same way...especially if there's no big hurt doing it anyway.

Seriously, doctors are maybe not such a morons after all :-)