Which board to send for repair - original or one from eBay?

QUESTION from the mailbox:

Item: VIZIO XVT473SV REPAIR SERVICE FOR MAIN BOARD 3647-0312-0150 / 3647-0312-0395

Dear coppelltvrepair,

Have two boards, original and one purchased on line. The original has the blinking logo- will not turn on. The purchased one (got screwed) seemed to work, but no picture or audio at any port, otherwise responds to inputs.

Which card would be best for repair. No sense it repairing both of them.
ANSWER:
(short): Send both!
(long) : A component level repair of something you have not yourself created is hardly ever a certain thing (more on that shortly) and the truth is we do not know for sure if either of the two, or however many boards you have, will end up functional. We have some statistical data, of course, and if listing is still up then this statistical data is in our (and your) favor that yes, it will be, but it's still not a sure thing.

Without knowing what is wrong with a board it is wrong to assume it can be fixed and without having seen and inspected the board it is wrong to assume its condition.

We do know for sure, however, that the more boards we receive, the higher the chances of a) us having them at least one fixed and working well; and b) us failing to service one, at least in a matter that makes is practically meaningful for both parties.

The very best guidance we can give is that we do NOT want boards that have visible signs of tampering (says so in the listing), traces of rust or other reactions resulting from nature or human impact on the board.

I can also say boards from random, small eBay sellers can easily come with invisible and possibly fatal defects; say user Joe has parted his TV and possibly a few other TVs and has made a little side business selling parts...Joe wouldn't be handling boards professionally, he's probably stacked them somewhere or threw them all in a box and when one sells he just goes hunting for it in one of the boxes and pulls it out.

Boards lay back to back, they scratch off each other and SMD capacitor or resistor or diode easily gets ripped off in the action. Good luck finding it!

Of course you aren't guaranteed against that happening with any board, but you get the point.

So to summarize, if you have one or more boards you pick the one that looks the most neat and send it if you want to send just one, or you send several if you want to increase the chances of us producing a working board.

You can have the rest back, we won't repair and charge you for more than one if you want one. You may end up paying a little extra and , worst case scenario, you may received back a board that has been worked on and it's still not functional, but that other board you'd send may as well save you another money and time for the mere cost of a combined shipping surcharge.

You can have your boards back or you can leave/sell them to us (no guarantee we'll be buying anything, but we might make you an offer if you indicate you do not need more than one back).