indeed quite dim, even with full backlight power, but worse still it had a horrible blue tint to everything. I tried to play with color temp, white balance etc, and even with reducing the blue as much as I could, whites were still very very blue.
After some quick googling of the possible remedies and ruling out all the reset/power cycling BS, I happened upon the finding that when LED backlights wear from extended use at full brightness, they apparently begin to put out blue light instead of the ~4000K white they put out when new. Apparently the yellow coating you see on almost all white LED lights is a phosphor painted over them to allow them to shine white light, as without it, they shine blue. Call me ignorant, but I never realized thats why all white LEDs are this color when not lit. Now, this is a 2017 set, so for it to be as blue as it is, it must have run a LOT of hours at full brightness. Im guessing homes just let this thing play unwatched all day long at full brightness for who knows how long. Understanding that, the LCD panel seemed relatively fine and the input latency per RTINGs is supposed to be ~20ms (not great, but not horrible) so I decided to open it up and see for myself if the backlight was indeed the blue tint problem. Turns out it was.
Super blue and relatively dim light coming from all these strips. Noting that this is a 2017 set, learning that this is a common type of failure only adds to my disdain for LED/LCDs as a display choice.
Yet another reason why they suck compared to CRT, plasma, and OLED tech. That said, Ive seen plenty of LCDs over the years that never turned blue, and Im not sure if its because they were CFL backlit or LEDs that were just not run at full brightness. In any case, Ive found a set of strips on Ebay that are supposed to have been pulled from a new cracked screen set for $30 shipped, so I got some coming.These sets put out over 300Vdc across arrays of these LEDs in series to light them up (which is common in LED TVs, though I have no idea why they do it that way instead of the LED required ~3 volts with the LEDs in parallel). What I didnt realize is that these sets also hold quite a nice charge, for QUITE a while after being unplugged! After getting a nasty zap when trying to take the bottom plastic reflector/diffuser off, I whipped out the old multimeter to see what was up. It was still measuring about 275V even after discharging nicely through my hand.
So I discharged it with a resistor, removed the LED strips, and have some new ones coming. Anyone else ever run across crazy blue LEDs like this? I'll update this post when I get the strips in and the repair is complete.
, that being the case, I just dont understand how they gained such a foothold in the mainstream market over such superior tech, it just blows my mind. My 2014 60" 1080p Sammy plasma we have in the bedroom still looks phenomenal, we watched some NFL on it this afternoon and it still blows me away. As I said above, Ive found replacement LEDs for $30 and have them coming. If I can repair the set and get a hundred or two bucks for it Im fine with that. It is a 4K VA panel so I'll probably play around with the RT5X and see what kind of image it produces before I get rid of it. It is quite large.
), I used a tiny flat head tweaker screw driver to bend the connector tabs back in place. Got all the LEDs to light this time, but didnt trust it, and certainly didnt want to have to open the set again, so I soldered some jumper wires across each connection to MAKE SURE no amount of moving and jostling would cause the LEDs to lose power connection.
