This just happened today (the TV is maybe 4.5 years old). Anybody dealt with major misconvergence like this? Any thoughts on repair costs vs. replacement costs? I poked around on eBay and my TV in working condition is worth between $500 and $800. Needless to say, my convergence is shot to hell, and I imagine repairs could cost something near the replacement cost, depending on what exactly broke. On the other hand, the Sharp Aquos I'd want to replace it with, if I had to buy something new, would cost $5000, which I don't want to spend right now.

My original goal was to get one more year of life out of this thing, then sell it since I'll be going on sabbatical for the 2007 calendar year. I don't know what the hot thing will be at the beginning of 2008, but it will be much cheaper than anything I can get now with comparable specs.

Thoughts?

Looks like maybe 3D glasses would help.

I'd suggest trying to fix it yourself by adjusting the convergence yourself. That said, I don't think I've ever seen a curving convergence problem before. But you'd be hard pressed to make it any worse.

You didn't say whether this was a projection TV or a tube TV.

If a tube TV, definitely just buy another one.

If a projection TV, then the convergence is quite fixable, but what it looks like is that the memory locations that store the convergence data have gotten erased and you'll need to look into why that happened and fix that FIRST, then fix the convergence.

The best source of information on how to fix problems like that (or at least, it was back when I had a projection TV) are the forums at www.hometheaterspot.com .

It's a CRT rear projector. The only user-adjustable convergence feature is the "Magic Focus" button. You press the button and it cycles through its own test patterns and does its own thing. The pictures you're seeing are after having run that cycle. Anything else requires pulling things apart to get to the internal dials and such.

If you look at the red and green guns, those are clearly within range of what adjustements could be expected to fix. The blue gun, however, is deeply broken. I don't see how it's salvageable, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

Ah. I seem to recall it was the Sony units that had the "magic focus" button four years ago. Am I right?

You're definitely dealing with a hardware problem related to the convergence board. It's either not storing its convergence settings, or the logic for the magic focus feature is failing, or the optical sensor that is the heart of the magic focus feature has a dead bug on it, or something like that.

I'll bet the people on the hometheaterspot forums can help you narrow down the problem. I'll bet you're not the only one who's had this happen. Go to the site, hit "Boards", then hit the "Manufacturer's Spot" boards, then hit the "Sony" board. Post the exact same thing you posted here, with the same photo links, and someone will help you. Make sure to post your exact model and tell them what you told us about having already hit the magic focus button.

And then come back here and let the curious among us know what the outcome is.

My TV is a Hitachi, and the Magic Focus button is pretty good, but it was never as good as what I could do by hand with the Electrohome projector we had installed in our auditorium when I was in grad school.

If you look at the Hitachi forum, it looks like I may have to replace several chips and/or resistors on the control board. It's $50 in parts, but whenever I touch a soldering iron, I have a habit of destroying anything I work on. On the other hand, paying somebody to do it would probably cost me $500+.

*sigh*

I once had to dig into my rear-projection Mitsubishi to do soldering work, and honestly, the worst part about the procedure was the careful dismantling and reassembling of the mainboard and daughterboards, and all the wiring connections. The soldering was super-easy. The set used large-format components for all of its electronics, lots of big single-layer through-hole boards with big old resistors and such.

Even then... Surely you've got a friend who can do soldering?

I may have located a friend who can help with the soldering. Now I'm just concerned that I do this without frying myself. Did you take care to discharge the big capacitors before disassembling your set?

No, I just made sure not to touch those parts.

My Hitachi 60" did the same thing under warrenty a couple of years ago, I called them and the repairman told me it was the video chip, it didnt take him but 5 seconds to replace the chip and the reciept said it would of cost me about $250, but you could probably get on some forums and find out exactly what chip it is and replace it with no problem, because I dont think mine was soldered just pins If I remember correctly, I would take a look but I sold the TV a couple of months ago.

I had a Pioneer Elite do that once. Service company spent months in and out of the house. Kept jumping back out of convergence. They hauled it into their shop. Worked with Pioneer for another month on it. Pioneer finally gave up and sold me a newer model at a discounted price.

From my experience, I would say call a service company and if they don't fix it the first time, it's shot.

I eventually migrated to a Plasma and I love it.

I am having a very similar problem with my JVC 56" RPTV. The convergence is all messed up. I have been quoted $550 and $250 over the phone from two different repair shops. Is the $250 kind of suspect...I assumed it would cost ~500 to fix.

Oh yeah, I am not an electronics guy so now way am I attempting this on my own.

Thanks

Until someone has actually diagnosed the problem, they can't know what the failure is, so they can't give you an exact quote, because it might need parts or it might not.

On my set, re-soldering the RGB board connector, and re-soldering the convergence board connector, solved the problems. The real issue was getting the set properly re-converged after the repairs. That took time and care to get it right.

On most rear projection CRT televisions (I'm assuming yours is also a CRT rear projector?), the job of re-converging everything without inducing a "wavy" distorted picture, that's a tricky process and takes an expert. Even a dedicated tinkerer like me, who did it for long hours over many months, couldn't get it as nice as a pro did it in about 3 hours of fast work.

I guess I never wrote up my experience. In short, doing the soldering was painless and the TV's been running happily ever after.

Thanks to the power of Google, I discovered that other owners of my TV were experiencing identical problems to my own. (Google search on the exact model number was the key.) Based on that, the diagnosis was that the op-amps that drive the CRT steering magnets were shot. There are basically two large op-amp chips, each of which has three op-amps inside it (one does the X-axis for each of the three color guns, while the other does the Y-axis). Without even opening up my TV, I ordered the parts from an online reseller (cost, maybe $30).

I left the TV powered down for a week (no way do I want to deal with big, ugly capacitors shorting across my body). Meanwhile, I borrowed a professional soldering iron from work, some solder and a dinky board to practice on. I was having a hell of a time tinning the tip of the soldering iron. I ended up going to the local electronic parts store and buying a new tip (screwdriver-shaped, I forget the price, but it was pretty cheap), as well as a really swank solder sucker.

Now, the soldering worked exactly like it was supposed to. I was happily attaching and detaching a resistor from my practice board. Finally, on to the real TV.

I extracted the board from the TV like I was supposed to, first taking a bunch of pictures so I'd know what went where. There were a whole bunch of power connectors and other things I had to unplug which looked identical to one another. Luckily, they were white. I marked those up with a Sharpie, photographed some more, and took it all apart. The hardest part was that there were some screws holding the board down requiring me to use a stubbly screwdriver in tight quarters.

Okay, now I've got the board with the dead op-amps on it. Well, several resistors on the board were clearly burned to a crisp. I ended up finding the repair manual for my TV (again, thanks to copious Google searching), which thankfully had resistance values for all the resistors. One more trip to the electronics parts store, and I was good to go.

Desoldering and resolding was relatively straightforward. The op-amps connect to a big aluminum heat sink, so I used some heat sink paste, normally for CPUs, on my new op-amps.

Okay, I put it all back together again, powered it up, and it worked! Kinda. The convergence was messed up beyond what the "Magic" auto-converger could fix. This required more advice from the net about how to use some weird remote-control combinations to get you into the service menu. With that, I reconverged the set properly, and it's been running flawlessly since then.

Total cost: less than $50 in parts, one favor to borrow the soldering iron, two or three round-trips to the electronics parts store, and half a day's labor.

If I actually knew what I was doing, and had the correct diagnosis from the get go, I imagine it would only be an hour of labor. If I knew what I was doing but had to actually diagnose the problem, then I can only imagine it could take much longer. If somebody wants to charge you $300, that's probably reasonable, all things considered. If somebody wants to charge you $500 (which isn't unreasonable), then maybe it's time to get a new TV.

DW....that's pretty much what I figured too. My limit is $350 bucks, anything more and I am looking to buy a new LCD or plasma! Worst case scenario, maybe I can get $50-100 for the broken TV on craigslist to somebody that can do the work himself like you and fix it on the real cheap.

You have one of two problems. Sometimes both.

Problem #1) CRT Fluid is Cloudy

Projection TV tubes have a liquid coolant that is used to keep them from overheating. After many years the coolant in the blue and green tubes will become cloudy and cause the screen to look dull, red/orange, etc. You may even see halos around images.


Solution #1

What you will need to do is replace the coolant and clean the crt. You can get a repair kit from www dot TvRepairKits dot com that includes replacement coolant, photos. instructions, etc.

Problem #2)

Your TV may have a convergence failure. ( common problem )

Here are some of the most common symptoms and example photos of a convergence problem




Screen looks 3D
Colors don't line up
One or more colors can't be adjusted when using the convergence menu.
Screen is bowed or warped.
Here are some photos of convergence problems.




Here is a quick test....

Using your original remote go-to the tv settings then goto the convergence section.

Try to adjust the red and then the blue convergence.

You should be able to move them up, down, left, and right.

If you can't move them in all directions your convergence chips are bad and should be replaced. This is a common problem.

Solution # 2

You will need to replace the convergence chips and possibly some convergence resistors and pico fuses. Its a fairly easy DIY job or you can call in a pro. If you want to do the repair yourself check the site www TvRepairKits com. Their kits include a photo instruction guide, original OEM Sanyo STK chips, convergence resistors, pico fuses, thermal paste, email/phone support, etc.

Wow, that's a new one. Highly targeted and almost relevant spam. You almost want to wonder whether this was completely automated or whether there was some sort of human in the loop.

Looking into the BBS spam folder, the targeted ones like this seem to have started a bit under a year ago. Not sure exactly how it is done, but it's pretty sophisticated if it's completely automated. I've heard of some operations that can even defeat captcha by grabbing them, and prompting a human on a different site to enter it, usually to look at a free porn picture or something.

On my blog, I've noticed a trend of spammers selecting some subset of the text from the main blog piece and adding links to their own stuff. That's the sort of thing you can easily imagine automating. This, on the other hand, looks much more sophisticated. Hmm...

wfaulk - Sorry - the intent was not to spam your site. We are a small company that helps people fix their TV sets by selling diy tv repair kits. Were not some automated spam machine. We just stumbled on your site because someone above had a convergence issue which we are very familiar with. I apologize if it came off as spam by including our website link. I hate spam myself and have several forums that I run that have to be scrubbed 24/7. Again - Please accept my apology - Were just trying to make a living and help people out at the same time.

Thanks
Ed

Haha. Nearly three years later!