Peter's Blog

Old 32 inch Hitachi TV in computer room was getting annoying:

• generally poor picture quality: lousy colour
• very poor picture quality when using scart lead: hence had to connect to PVR with phono so whenever I turned it on I had to manually switch it to EXT2.
• randomly turned itself off once a day or so, causing babies to start screaming at loss of 'In the Night Garden'. My hack had made this happen a lot less but it still happens at annoying times (e.g. ending of Titanic). Once it is in the mood it won't stay turned on for more than a minute.
• electric shocks when I fiddled with the aerial cable (turning equipement off when fiddling with cables is for wimps).
• original remote long lost by previous owner, programmable remotes can change volume/channel but not colour/settings.

So after some scouring I bought a 42 inch plasma TV. It's a Philips and it was £650 from amazon (compare to £899 for a 40 inch LCD in Currys). Ok Philips isn't the most popular make but reviews I read were enthusiastic. Picture is amazing, very sharp if a little too bright, everything is a bit cartoonish. Setting picture to 'soft' makes it ok. It seems to be lacking in front panel connectors but I never use those anyway. I was initially reluctant to buy a plasma as I heard they degraded faster than LCD's but apparently modern ones aren't so bad and we're talking 20,000 hours to degrade to half brightness on a tv that should only be on a couple of hours a day so it may be something to worry about 27 years from now.

I've connected it up to an AV amp and a big pair of speakers and it is fantastic. The built-in sound is ok but the amp and speakers put it in a different league. The TV has freeview (DVB-T) built in but the PVR is a much nicer thing to use: for example the guide in the TV is reluctant to show you what is on beyond the next program and doesn't show a picture. It also changes channel sluggishly.

Time to break out Dean's Firefly DVD set, now I have something decent to watch it on. One question though: is it better to watch Serenity before or after?

I inherited a 32 inch widescreen TV, a CRT one but ok for my computer room. It was working before I got it but it had been put in storage for a few months and shaken around by removal men. When I came to start using it I soon discovered that it had developed an annoying fault: it would randomly turn itself off every ten minutes or so.

I left it switched off for a few weeks, watching a 14 inch portable instead (or rather daughter watching cbeebies on it). This weekend I was inspired to do something about it so I looked up the model number (Hitachi C32WD2TN) and googled for it.

There were various comments about dry joints so I took the main board out (very easy, a single board about a foot square) and ran a soldering iron over all dry looking joints. This didn't fix it, no joy. I googled some more and found this one message on a forum, written by someone called 'guest':

Hello, Apart from checking all stabiliser ICs', links (solder top and bottom), etc.and checking for poor connections, there was a mod., to add a spring from the top of the wire clamp on the LOPTX, to the heat sink of the line transistor -(this was for the set going into standby, but coming out, if switched on via the handset.) Best of luck

I figured out that LOPTX meant 'line output transformer' and by googling for this I determined roughly what one looked out. The one in my TV had a [ shaped clip which I determined was the 'wire clamp'. About 3/4 inch from this was a heatsink, presumably on the line transistor. I rigged a piece of wire between these and gave it a try.

Well I ran it for seven hours on sunday and again for an hour or two today and problem seems to have gone away.

Interesting to note that the tube was made by LG.