Before You Buy that Beautiful Samsung TV

In May of 2008, my family purchased a new home, and we also bought new appliances at that time. We had never owned a flat panel TV prior to that, and since we got such a great deal for buying multiple appliances at once, we decided to buy the Samsung 40 inch LCD TV with 1080p resolution. Of course we were thrilled with the great quality product we had purchased for our first flat panel. The TV is mounted on the wall above our fireplace and we love it!

About 4 weeks ago, our beloved Samsung started to take a while to come on after we pressed the power button. We had just changed our cable box around that time as well, so we initially thought the new cable box was taking longer to sync with the TV. The problem continued to get worse. The TV continues to make a clicking noise, as if someone is clicking the power button over and over again and sometimes the Samsung chimes will sound a few times, and after about 15-20 minutes of this, it will now turn on. Just last week, I decided to google search "Samsung TV won't turn on". To my surprise, there were a lot of results returned with that search, and many variations of the search. "Samsung TV won't turn on just clicks", "Samsung TV won't power up", etc.

I soon realized that many, many people were having the same problem we were having. They were describing it exactly as it was happening for us. Sometimes, when the TV finally comes on, there are small pink dots throughout the picture, and you have to turn it off, then turn it back on until the picture is clear. We did not want to believe the problem was the TV, because we had spent what we consider a fair amount of money on a product we believed was high quality.

There were a few detailed descriptions of the problem and how to fix it on the web, along with images and youtube how to videos to help others fix their problem. There are capacitors on the power supply that blow, because the power supply itself has a higher voltage than the capacitors. There were even pictures of how the capacitors look when they are blown. My husband and I decided to take the back off of our TV and have a look. Sure enough, the power supply was right there as soon as we removed the back, and the bad capacitors stuck out like a sore thumb.

This TV that we paid over 1200.00 for would be curbside for most people, as it would probably cost a minimum of 300.00 to have a TV repair man fix the TV, and we have recently seen this same TV advertised for just over 500.00. I suddenly wondered how much garbage are we dumping into the environment because of these tiny capacitors blowing.

Now, it is hard to believe Samsung is not aware of this problem, because there are so many internet posts about it, and there are multiple models mentioned, not just this one (LNT4065f). Many people feel Samsung should have recalled the defective product, but I would have been happy with a new power supply sent to me, as it is really simple to change the power supply. Since the TV is more than a year old, Samsung has no obligation to fix the product. The terms of purchase make that clear. If this were a one in a million problem we might write it off as bad luck, but it appears Samsung continued to produce and sell a defective product, as many of the posts were from consumers who had their TVs well over two years ago. I would like to see a statement from Samsung indicating whether the TVs they are producing today have capacitors with high enough voltage to handle the power being supplied to them from the source.

We are lucky, because my brother is a technical wizzard and will be replacing our capacitors tonight. Many posters were able to change their capacitors successfully and their TVs are now working well. Hopefully our TV is back in good health after tonight.