Last week I repaired an LED TV that broke on me after about 7 years. The experience was... confusing. In a good way.
First, some context; the TV in question is a Sony Bravia. Sony, in my experience, is really good a making things proprietary and not wanting people to tinker with them. Secondly, people (at least in my experience) do NOT have a tendency to repair TVs. So, there doesn't seem like there should be much resistance to going proprietary in this area and making TVs super difficult to repair. Thirdly, while the landscape has certainly changed, CRT TVs were historically also very dangerous to repair.
Not that the past need necessarily dictate the future. Though it sets a precedent which, once again, should seem appealing for TV manufacturers to continue.
Given all this, I was surprised at how easy the process was. First, there was the broken TV itself. When it broke an LED in the IR sensor bar flashed a certain number of times indicating the rough nature of the problem. This is a common diagnostic technique for a number of types of electronics. I suppose it is useful for Sony techs as well. Internet suggested that the issue indicated one of the boards or the LEDs as the problem with the LEDs being the more common by a long shot.
Next, I looked up the cost of the LEDs. On AliExpress they were $25 CAD after taxes and shipping. That seemed reasonable. In fact, the cost was the least surprising part. Sourcing locally the price ranged from 2-6x that and the cost of the boards which are much more niche were more expensive.
So, I moved onto the process of the repair. After watching a video it indicated that it could be completed more or less with 1 tool. A single philips head screw driver. No torx screws? No 20x different sizes? No special equipment needed? The videos DID include a number of things I didn't have or didn't used (suction cups to lift the screen, tapes for keeping layers together, etc...).
All told, my first pass took about an hour. I put it back together, had missed 2 of the bezel screws and somehow gotten some of the layers placed incorrectly causing it to look like 1 of the LEDs was burned out. So I took it apart and redid it all. Found the missing screws, and fixed the layers of the screen. Second shot took about 15-20 minutes. The longest chunk of time really being just dealing with the multitude of screws and being sure to do things in the right order.
A fairly modern TV is actually a surprisingly simple thing. Not sure why I expected it to be otherwise. At the end of the day it is mostly just a really cheap computer, a control board for the LEDs, some LED strips and then the rest is basically just plastic and screens. Mine had 3 boards inside it, but they weren't exactly big and complicated.
I suppose the confusion is this. Most people spend a LOT more than I do on these things. I tend to keep my TV budget in the $400-600 range. Whereas most people I know average more in the $1000+ range with some people buying TVs that are even more expensive than that. And, when they die, they just toss them and buy a new one.
For me, my TV wasn't expensive, so I DID debate whether to even bother. Had I spent over $1K on the thing though, I wouldn't have seen even a board replacement as too much of an investment. As the TVs go up in cost, the cost is in the "analog" parts. The screens primarily. The LED strips and boards in a $1k or even $4k TV aren't going to be much more expensive than those in my $600 TV. And those expensive parts aren't the ones most likely to fail catastrophically. TVs, after all, don't take a lot of physical abuse. They tend to sit in one spot.
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