eBay fraud: "SAMSUNG BRAND NEW UPPER AND LOWER BUFFER board LJ41-02760A & LJ41-02761A KIT"

The title of this article is purposefully made to match a particular listing on eBay.

I am sure it will eventually become invalid , so I am not going to post a link to it here, but I am going to post a picture of it while it's still active and explain why is it a fraud and from there, how many eBay listings in the "electronics>parts" category are fraud.

Here is the listing (click to see full screen):

This listing is definitely a fraud!

First, the specified buffer boards have been manufactured in 2006/2007 and because they go bad so often (as I've written before) at some point in 2010 pretty much all vendors here in USA exhausted all their availabilities. There was a period of time during which the boards could simply not be found and we, like some others, had to rely on repairing the original buffers.

Repairing the old buffers did not prove to be cost-effective (for reasons explained in the above referenced article) , but luckily Samsung has responded in a fast manner (for a company their size) and produced the new batch of buffer boards , which now have 4 buffer ICs (100 bits each) as opposed to the original ones that have 6 ICs with 64 bits.

Granted, this is a logical argument, not a proof that the boards listed here are old and used.

But wait, there's more!

All OEM buffer boards of this kind come with a revision model stamped on them.

The oldest ones are revision A1 and the latest ones (of the 6 - IC model) is A5; every TV sustain set we have seen here that has never been opened before (and we've seen easily hundreds) comes with buffers that have A1 to A5 on them.

Oddly enough, buffers sent to parts distributors come without revision label on them. I am talking about the ones that were in the distribution network before they got exhausted.

I don't know if that is on purpose or not, but again all the old style replacement buffers we have seen have never had revision label on them.

This, by itself, is still not a definite proof that the listing is a fraud, but you have to agree it adds up to the logical conclusion.

The final argument is probably the weakest one, but I'll present it anyway since it does have value to me.
As I've blogged before,  we are not new to importing from China.

My conclusion working with various electronic components vendors is that they are not so much committing fraud on purpose as they are simply not at all understanding what are they selling.

Perhaps someone in the supply chain there is clearly aware what they are doing , but it's usually not the dealer you communicate with; those dealers are often willing to learn and provide feedback back to the chain so that they do not lose your business.

How well does that work is another story.

But my point here is that based on experience I can easily guess that the seller doesn't even know that what they describe is, well, a nonsense. They probably offer it in good faith hoping to earn some valuable American dollars.

Looking at their other sales and the listing's description only adds to that theory; oh, and referencing the boards by their pure PCB IDs instead of the assembly ID (LJ92-XXX) or the marketing component ID (BN96-xxx) is yet another strong indicator that they have no clue what are they selling.

Bottom line?

Beware what you're buying...or you'll get what you deserve :-)

Samsung 214T LS21BRBAB does not power / blinks once

This is a story about pragmatism. A tiny bit of knowledge sneaks it at some point, but for the most part it's just a story. If you expect ground breaking discoveries, mysterious occurrences or erotic adventures then you should move to some of the next posts. You may have better chances there. Bear in mind I am not promising anything.

A local customer called on the phone and asked if we can fix 21'' LCD monitor.

We told him it's probably cheaper to buy a new one these days, but he said he's curious what could it be and is ready to pay our minimal service fee for 32'' LCD TVs for us to take a look.

Monitor was 21'' Samsung 214T [R] S, model code LS21BRBAB/XAA and as customer told us he had looked it up on Google and, upon finding a common failure in the power board caused by bad capacitors, has replaced them to no success. So he wanted us to take a look and even if we can't fix it he'd pay us $55.

For your viewing pleasure, this is how Samsung 214T looks inside:

For the technically challenged and the rest from the normal side of the humanity the brighter thing on the left is a power board and the green thing on the right is the main board.

The power board incorporates in it functionality for providing the special needs of the florescent lamps that provide backlight for the LCD assembly.

Well long story short, the customer has replaced all caps on board and, from the look of it, has done it well.

The monitor was powering on all right, then the display would flash for a split second and instantly turn back again. Monitor would power on and off, just wouldn't stay bright.

Many LCD TVs have the same symptom and the cause us, overwhelmingly, in the circuits that provide power to the back light lamps. In large TVs they are often on a separate board, but smaller TVs and monitors they are sometimes incorporated in the main board just as shown here.

There are several reasons why something like that would happen and before troubleshooting it I took a quick peek at the power board. I was looking for a board label, something that would allow me to look it up on eBay and see what would it cost.
What I had come across was a label NB-20 towards the top of the board.

So I looked that up and a single result showed up offering me a "TESTED, WORKING POWER SUPPLY BOARD NB-20". It was asking $69.95 plus $9.95 shipping. Here's the actual link.(bear in mind it may be invalid by the time you read this).

$80 is a lot of money for a 21'' LCD TV. Way too much in my book.

But then again the link mentions that this is board "IP-58130A", so I searched for that.

Bingo! $26.99 direct from China, 20,000 sales seller, 98.8% feedback.

Reserved as I am , I think this is a no brainer.

I put together the TV as quick as possible and plan on telling the customer to pay me our standard fee less $27 and get a new board from there.

It's not about the money...and I know I can fix the damn board.

I just don't think I can do it the first time for under $27.

If you consider buying parts from China consider this

Next time a customer complains that they received some of our ICs with bent legs I swear I'll send them here to
see some of the REAL problems when purchasing parts.

All of the below are sold to as for "new" and, if you can believe it, prices are as for "new".

After 2 didn't work right out of the box we took the freed to cut them open and then picked another two from the same box and opened them WITHOUT INSTALLING AND TRYING THEM FIRST.

I guess it is not hard to predict what the fourth IC on the image below will look like inside, is it?

 

Rust on ESD components, rust on pin solder connections...

Notice how the original black filling of the IC is covered with a thin layer of a gray one.

There are several take home lessons from this:

1) Buying from China is risky. And it's not because your Chinese partner necessarily wants to trick you. Those parts were received from a company we've been working with for some time with and we do not doubt their honesty.
The problem is they themselves aren't good enough to filter the bad parts that they purchase.
And because we've tried several different vendors we can say this is the common situation out there.

2) It pays for a customer to purchase parts from a company that actually uses them in its own work. If we had sold those parts to customers and we haven't had to use them ourselves we'd probably be doubting our own customers' honesty when they call back and say that apparently brand new working parts do not work.
But since we use them ourselves we act as a first line of quality assurance for customers.
When the product you're buying is not only valuable, but greatly affects the time you spend on a job it does matter to know you're getting quality stuff.

3) Next time you want to save a penny - or even a dollar - by buying directly from China consider all the headaches that a local American company saves you. Not to say all American companies are perfectly well equipped to know the difference between good and bad parts...not at all.
But it's it's still a whole lot easier to hold a company responsible in America than in China.
And frankly, if there was an American company that could offer us the parts we need at decent prices we'd sure be buying them from here!