TV problems

[Gertjan]

We have a 8+ year old 36" RCA CRT tube TV. It's been fine all this time, but last week it suddenly started acting up. I was wondering if one of you may have an idea of what I can try to do to fix it, or if we should just toss it and buy a new TV...

The setup:

TiVo and DVD player go into receiver using S-VIDEO. Receiver S-VIDEO out goes into TV's S-VIDEO input. Regular cable (not digital) is split, and goes into the TiVo and TV (RF input on both.) TV is typically switched to the S-VIDEO input. We hardly ever switch it away from that, and just use the receiver to switch between TiVo and DVD. 95% of the time we just use the TV to watch TiVo, so we don’t really change anything.

The symptoms:

1. Last week (Thu) the TV displayed a gray screen with the text ‘Unusable Signal’. This is what it normally displays when you don’t feed it a signal (for example, the receiver is off but the TV is on.) The TV was switched to the video input (S-VIDEO).
2. When I turn on the receiver (which is switched to the TiVo), I can hear the sound of the channel the TiVo is tuned to. This to me says that the TiVo does get a valid cable signal and is able to decode it etc. However, the gray picture mentioned above remains on the TV, indicating that the TV doesn’t see a usable signal.
3. Next step in diagnosing was to take the receiver out of the loop to see if it was the device with the problem.
4. When the TV is switched to the cable signal (so no receiver or anything in the mix), it displays a black picture with only “white noise” for audio on all channels.
5. When I tell the TV to scan & detect channels on the cable input, it says it finds 60-some channels, but all those are also black picture with white noise audio.
6. In the TV’s setup, I changed the input configuration from Cable to UHF and repeated the previous step to see if it made a difference, but pretty much the same result with black picture and white noise.
7. When I plug the TiVo directly into the TV using S-VIDEO, the gray picture / unusable signal message remains.
8. When I plug the DVD player directly into the TV using S-VIDEO, the gray picture / unusable signal message remains.
9. I pulled out our camcorder and connected it to the COMPOSITE input on the TV, remove the S-VIDEO input (TV picks up the S-VIDEO or the COMPOSITE, depending on which input has a signal), but the gray picture remains.
10. All these tests seem to suggest that the problem is NOT with the signal source. It seems unlikely that all these devices suddenly are not outputting a usable video signal. (Not having another TV in the house means i do not have a way to verify this though.)
11. These tests seem to suggest that the problem is in the input path inside the TV, perhaps with the decoder or something like that?

Do any of you have any idea of what to try next and / or what needs to be fixed? We’re not looking to spend a whole lot of money on this TV (would rather just spend that money on a new TV, something like a decent 42”-46” widescreen LCD or something like that.)

Thanks!

[G-Bull]

First, let me state that I'm no expert at TV repair.

I'd say that your steps # 7, 8, and 9 all point to the TV as the culprit (as you indicated) which would probably mean that you would need to have a technician come out to take a look at it and possibly make a repair. I doubt that would be too cheap, but I really don't know...

The only thing I can think of for you to try, or at least confirm that you've already tried, is to rule out the S-Video cable itself... When you did your steps #7 and #8, did you use the same S-Video cable, and just hook up the different devices to the cable that's already connected to the TV? Or did you actually unplug that cable (which might be the culprit) from the TV, and plug in the Tivo and DVD player into the TV with different S-Video cables?

That's the only other thing I can think of to trouble-shoot... otherwise I'd say you're right it's the TV.

[Gertjan]

Thanks for the reply. good suggestion. IIRC i used different S-VIDEO cables, since i basically took the S-VIDEO cables coming out of the DVD player / TiVo and instead of plugging them into the receiver i plugged them directly into the TV. In addition to that, i hooked up the camcorder with COMPOSITE, so that'd rule out the S-VIDEO cable being the sole culprit i think.

Since i was kind of fearing it's the TV, and that repairs and / or component replacement was going to be necessary, which would probably not be a cheap fix, i've been doing some research here and elsewhere about a decent replacement TV. We don't need a theater-quality TV since this is just for casual living room TV watching, so last night the wife said let's just get the Vizio VU42LF HD 1080p LCD TV. Hooked it up late last night, and been tweaking it, and was very pleased with the results.

I'm still curious as to what could be wrong with the tube TV...