Summer Flowers - July 2011

Potato Flowers

Potato flowers growing in a garden in southern Indiana (July 2011).  The progress of the potato was checked as well.  See next image.  As one can see, they are being grown in grass clippings.

Repairing Another Samsung LCD TV

This Samsung LCD TV (model LNT4065FX/XAA) was having a number of problems including taking 30-45 seconds to power on and sometime showing purple lines on the display when first turned on (see blog post about it with pictures CLICK HERE).  After contacting Samsung through their on-line form, I was contacted days later by a service person.  He did not think the problem was caused by capacitors but was instead the display controller board.  Well, apparently not.  The repair took about 30 minutes but capacitors had to be ordered on-line, they were $0.91 a piece.  After the repair, the television turned on in about 5 seconds and no recurrence of the purple display issue.

See this entry about another Samsung LCD TV that needed a  similar repair: CLICK HERE

UPDATE (Feb. 2012): Samsung has listed a settlement for this problem on their web site: http://www.samsung.com/us/capacitorsettlement/

Tools I used to make this repair: Philips screw driver, Weller soldering iron with stand, desoldering tool, wire cutters, and solder

This next picture shows the cluster of capacitors causing the problems.

The green arrow points to the area of the power supply board the capacitors were found on.

The next two pictures show the 1000 uF 25 V SAMWHA electrolytic capacitor with bulging tops.  Note the small brown spots on top of two of the capacitors.

Last two pictures are of the repaired board with Panasonic capacitors.

Picture of underneath circuit board before the capacitor leads are clipped.

Fixing Samsung Television

Recently, I was asked to look at a Samsung LCD television (model code LN26A450C1DXZA) that would not turn on. The red LED was lit so the power supply board was still supplying power to the television.  Even so the television would not come on.  The red LED would blink from time to time.

Update (Feb. 2012): Samsung Electronics of America has listed a capacitor problem settlement on their web site: http://www.samsung.com/us/capacitorsettlement/

If one does research on the Internet one can find that Samsung LCD televisions have had issues with capacitors. So I decided to investigate. On the power supply board, a SAMWHA 2200 uF 10 V electrolytic capacitor was found with brown material out of the top. I did not have a spare one but found a salvaged 2200 uF 35V one and wire it in.  The television began to work so I ordered extra capacitors because we had another Samsung television having trouble powering on. See this problem in an earlier post: CLICK HERE and it was repaired (documented in this posting CLICK HERE).

Here are the pictures of the repaired television.  It now turns on almost immediately.  The new capacitor costs ($0.89).  I ordered an extra one.  A possible class action lawsuit might be filed against Samsung about this issue. I read part of the filing and the lawyers contend this is being caused by a design flaw in the board allowing the capacitors to overheat.  If this really is the reason then this capacitor could fail again.  Oddly, they also bring up faulty capacitors which means it is not the board but the components used.  In this case, I believe the new part is from Panasonic.