I've got a Magnavox 55" projection TV that recently stopped working.
The first hint of a problem came while watching it last Tuesday. First
the picture only took up half the vertical height and it had kind of a
fisheye look to it. Then, after a short while, it would return to
normal. Shortly after that, it lost color and was all black & white.
At various times, the screen would also just go black for a split
second before returning to normal.
I turned the TV off and, a couple hours later, I turned it back
on and everything seemed to work fine for about 3 hours. Then it
totally shut off and would not do anything. The green light on the
front came on and you could hear it power up, but there was no picture
and no sound.
I decided to take the back cover off and look around to see if I
could see anything obviously wrong. There was a lot of dust in there,
so I used a can of spray air to get it off the components. I couldn't
see anything that looked out of the ordinary to me, so I put the cover
back on. When I hit power after that, it worked fine. It continued to
work fine for about 4 days, so I thought everything was OK. Then on
Saturday I left the house and left the TV on. When I came back, the
TV was off and I was back to the power up but no sound or picture
problem again.
I took the back cover off again and I saw that one of the circuit
boards on the bottom had a small bit (about a teaspoon) of oil on it
with some black residue in it.
So that's my story. Does anybody know what kind of a situation
I've got on my hands? This TV is only 3 years old. I'm about to take
it to a repair shop, but I wanted to see if anybody had an idea of
what was wrong before I did that so I can have an idea of what kind of
repair bill I'm looking at.

Jeff Haff