Good morning,

About 6 months ago, a friend gave us his old TV as he was upgrading to
plasma. At the time, he told us that there was a small problem with
the TV that he described to us (I figured that for free, I'll live with
it :-)). Occasionally, the picture would get fuzzy and grow much
darker. Reds seem to dominate (at least on fleshtones), but other
colors are there as well. Sound remains fine. His solution was to turn
the TV off and on. He said it never takes more than a couple of tries.
And so we did; life was good for several months.

Over the past month or so, other strange behaviors have surfaced.
Shortly after turning on the TV, the picture will be lost, replaced by
a series of B&W static bands (about 3 or 4, horizontally, go across the
screen); these will then go to a full static screen, which gradually
goes to black, and then the regular picture returns. At the same time
this is going on, the sound also provides a wonderful array of what
sound like test tones, which change with the picture, and which lower
in frequency as the picture gets darker. It returns to normal as well
when the picture returns.

Well, life is not so rosy for the past couple of days.....
I'll still get the B&W test pattern thing, but now after that, all I
get is the darkened picture with good sound. I can make out shapes and
things, but that's about it. No number of on/offs have any affect. I've
tried using the degaussing button on the front panel. I've tried
unplugging the TV, letting it set for 10 minutes or so, and then
plugging it back in. All of the input selections on the TV act the
same way.

While I'm an electronics hobbyist at times, and am somewhat adept with
a soldering iron, I have a feeling that a repair of this sort is out of
my league, if it's even repairable. I know enough to keep my fingers
out of the back, having no desire to meet a charged capacitor in close
quarters :-).

So, my question is mostly about the likelihood of a successful repair
at a "reasonable" cost. I'm not sure what reasonable would be, given I
don't even know how much this unit would have cost new. (I believe the
set is about 12-13 years old). But, having spent about $500 to repair
our Mitsubishi projection TV, I don't expect it to be $25 bucks. Any
idea where the problem(s) may lie and how extensive the repairs would
be? Any chance at all it could be a DIY repair?

Thanks for any help you might provide.

Ron


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RonG