This moment of badassity is brought to you by my husband.
So a brief history our of tv first. My husband bought a 42" Polaroid LCD TV back in 2008 from Walmart during a Black Friday deal. Fast forward to a few months ago, the TV's colors start acting up. First, it would take a little time for the colors to normalize (TV had to warm up a bit). No big deal. Then not too long after, the colors were no longer adjusting after the TV was warmed up. So we ended up going into the setup menu and manually adjusted the color settings. Ok, so this was more annoying, but the TV was still watchable. Then about two weeks ago the colors went from okay to terrible and it made no difference what we did in the setup menu.
At this point, I should mention that we have a friend who started having some color issues on the same TV (bought under the same circumstances in the same year) last year until it's display just went black (audio still works) back in Feb. She had done some internet research into the problem and found a number of posts that mentioned blown electrolytic capacitors as a possible cause.
When we started experiencing our TV issues, we recalled what our friend had said about the capacitors so we decided to unscrew the back panel of our TV and see if any of the capacitors looked bad. Upon taking off the back panel, none of the capacitors appeared to be blown, which was somewhat disappointing since we were now back to the drawing board. So my husband and I spent about an hour trying to figure out another possible reason for our issue. Based on our findings, our TV screen appeared to be solarized, which led us to find some information about the t-con (timing control) board that looked promising.
Long story short, we had our friend bring over her TV this past Saturday and we looked under her TV's back panel for any blown capacitors. Again, we found nothing out of the ordinary so my husband suggested that we try swapping the t-con boards since it sounded like her TV's problem was different. After making the swap, we turned on our TV with her t-con board in it and the colors were back to normal. Problem solved for our TV! As for our friend's TV, my husband thinks that the main board itself might need replacing, which looks to be the hardest component to replace. Nonetheless, we at least fixed one of the TVs and since my husband and I had already purchased a new TV, we ended up giving our fixed TV to our friend so that she'd have a TV again. :-)
