My idiot box died. For the past 8-10 months it would have problems starting if you turned it off and turned it back on within a three minute time period. Normally I’d leave it alone for three-five minutes and then flip it on and we’d be good-to-go. On Wednesday, Emma came upstairs in the morning while I was getting ready to tell me the TV wasn’t working. I came downstairs, expecting something simple, like pushing the TV input button on the remote and then turning it on.
Nope. Dead. The power light flips on for about three seconds, the picture never fires up, and then it shuts back off. The “reset” involves unplugging the TV for four hours. FOUR HOURS. What? What kind of reset is that? I’m putting reset in quotations because I think that I would be doing air quotes with my fingers if I was actually telling this story out loud.
I called two separate TV repair shops to get an estimate. Unfortunately they both said the same thing; the TV is in shutdown mode to protect itself from more damage and they will have to poke around to find which of the possible 1,037,0752 faults could be the issue. If I have them pick the TV up there’s a $125-150 fee that’s tacked onto the final bill. Both places estimate $350-450 for the repairs.
I feel I’m faced with a quandary. The TV is a Mitsubishi 42″ 1080HD. I bought in 2002 for a whopping $2200. The repair costs could be as much as 20-25% of the total cost of the television. Should I just go buy a new TV? I don’t want to spend another $2200 bucks, or even $1000 on a television.
The only other problem I’ve had with the TV is how it displays the color black. Black, or darkness, like a nighttime shot is more like an absence of picture, not black. On really dark images or scenes from a movie or DVD the picture is almost impossible to see. I don’t know if this is part of the problem the TV is having at the moment or something different. It’s rear-projection but I don’t remember seeing the same behavior on other rear-projections that I’ve seen. Maybe the repair guy can look at that too…
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