Workshop Day

I had quite a few repairs building up, most of them needing parts fitted, the first two this morning required some really delicate soldering, an AS-15 Gamma Correction chip on a Samsung t-con panel, around 1cm x 1cm with 48 pins, each one smaller than the tip of my soldering iron. This is an IC that can cause all sorts of interesting picture effects, it’s a bit challenging to replace but always worth the effort to keep yet another TV out of landfill.

Next up was Panasonic DMR-EZ49, it’s a DVD / Video combi recorder that’s no longer made, I don’t know why as it’s such a useful machine. Anyway, there was no picture from the inbuilt tuner and as this one was being used as a glorified freeview box on an old CRT type TV that was a bit of a problem, some of the menu functions didn’t work either, as soon as automatic tuning was selected the screen broke into lines. All this was common to one component, the AV processor chip under the video drive. This chip was slightly bigger than the AS-15, 2cm x 1.4cm but with 100 pins, not easy to remove let alone replace but another worthwhile repair.

Those two took me most of the day although I did get to replace a telescopic aerial on a DAB radio and diagnose a main panel fault on a 55″ Samsung, it probably needs reballing of the microprocessor but that is never a reliable repair, the best way is replacement of the panel, not cheap and not always easy to get hold of but I’ll wait and see what the customer wants to do!