Chosen Solution
Hi all - All power functions seem fine; TV images are dull but visible beneath a black and white noise; the pattern is in short horizontal lines as opposed to salt and pepper dots. detail of startup:
The effect is reminiscent of the days of component video, when if one of the three channels was unplugged or cross-wired. But there are no sources connected via component: all is HDMI or wall-cable. I’ve disconnected and reconnected all sources, and tried different connections on sources (where possible); everything returns an identical image result; menu resets have zero effect; all this leads me to believe it’s a hardware issue. And yes, menu options are also affected. Some animation that shows the low contrast and saturation.
The TV is ten years old; it didn’t see a ton of use, but it has been wall mounted in a 55" alcove (and consequently never cleaned )and collected plenty of dust through its vents over the years. It’s probably time to replace it - but The OLED I want is expensive! I thought maybe I could repair it myself for up to $200 and squeeze another year out of the TV. Hate to waste so much metal and plastic if it’s fixable. Following are photos of the inside - board #’s are based on Old Turkey’s photo maps below. Overview
Board 1(?) - where I found some dust and cleaned it off
These caps attracted dust like magnets, but it was easy to get off
A closer look at board 2 … the possible culprit.
And 3 and 5 together
Here is board 4, … in order to access it, I had to remove two screws and pull off a board above, which snaps magnetically into place:
To my untrained eye, nothing looked burned or exploded. But after cleaning, when powered on, aside from a general (seemingly normal) hum, I heard a louder, intermittent local hum almost like short-wave radio noise when I lifted the TV to its normal (vertical) position. That hum seemed to be coming from around here on board 1. View from the top-down.
When the TV was near vertical, the buzz reacted to movement and possibly my hands touching it - even if I was only touching the plastic front cover. With both hands off and no movement, the buzz stopped. Lowering down, it buzzed between 90º-70º; lower than that, no more buzz. Now it’s back together, and the TV operates just as before I opened it.
@dstlr that looks like a video processor issue. I suggest that you start by opening the back and clean all the boards. Check for bad caps and make sure the cable connectors are clean and not corroded. Post some images of all of your boards with your question. Use this guide Adding images to an existing question for that. A dim screen is usually related to an X-board issue. That would be board #2 in the attached image
Update (10/03/2017) @dstlr you are not going to give up that early, are you ;-)? Your boards look good so far. I just noted on the X=Board that there was 1 capacitor=cap that looked odd. May just be the light or the angle. Can you check this one out just to make sure
Let us know if you want to proceed. If you do you need a multimeter and some time to measure some things.
