Shadow on left of Samsung DLP screen - Page 2

If it is under warranty you have to use a Samsung ASC, and if this is the only one, yes you would have to use them, unless you wanted to take it to a more distant ASC.

mgreen200,

I think many of us would love to see your pics. Try posting them in this forum thread if you can do that.

Thanks, satman858

Since I don't have a truck I guess I am stuck in the waiting game.

Here are the pics. I have already ordered a new tunnel form samsungparts.com for $72. If you had a new tunnel and you are fairly good at taking stuff apart and putting it back together that it wasnt that bad. I had a hard time getting the color wheel in and out. I can only get three pics on this post Ill have to split them.
I must caution that if you want to try this please take note of how stuff comes apart. You could easily turn your set into a paperweight.

enjoy

mrgreen200

Could the smudge you see be caused by fingerprints? Were you wearing gloves? Did there seem to be any sort of "grease" on any of the parts? Sounds like you were very close to getting it done. I commend you and thanks for the pics. I'll be storing them away for future reference.

I have a HLR5668W that I got in the PB July 05. The light engine was replaced with the left shadow problem last Sept. Last week the shadow returned on the right side. Its about 2" on the top tapering to 1/2" on the bottom. SS stated they would consider repairing it if its the same problems that I had back in Sept.

Once the set is running again I will have to purchase a EW since it is clear these sets will have multiple repairs in their lifetime.

I cleaned the mirrors with a q-tip and some windex before I put it all back together. I could have missed something I guess. I wasnt expecting it to work as well as it did or I would have been more careful. I think I also scratched one of the mirrors too, which could be the problem.

I have posted this in the thread dedicated to my series of Samsungs sets, but for the record, here is my history with my HL-R6178W:

Just wanted to update you guys on my set. Got it back yesterday from the service center with a new light enigne and the shadow is again gone. Just in case anyone is keeping up with stats on these sets, here are mine:

HL-R6178W purchased on 7/22/2005
Delivered on 8/1/2005
Light Engines - 4
DMD Boards - 2
Time away from my home for repairs - Almost 5 weeks total

I know some of you guys have a problem with the sets being taken away to be repaired, but everytime mine comes back the picture is perfect. The one time it was repaired in my home they almost destroyed it. And the kid came in and put his tools on the piano black finish on my speakers!

Hopefully this is one of the new light engines that won't have the shadow problem pop back up.

Also, this last repair was done under my Warrantech extended warranty I bought from TV Authority at the time of purchase. I must say they were very easy to work with and even added the repair shop I wanted to use as a new service center for me. This repair was quicker and easier than the repairs that Samsung had made to the set.

If this is what I will be facing since I didn't take out the extended warranty, I think I will be selling my Samsung after I get it fixed.

As a rule I never buy extended warranties, except on laptops, my HDTV and my HD-DVD player. You may want to check with Samsung or Repairmaster an see if you can pick up the extended warranty now. It will pay for itself with one LE replacement.

BTW - other than the LE issues I love the picture on this TV.

I bought a 4266 for my bedroom and I get a Moire effect on the screen.
Anyone encounter this?

I have a few questions to ask about these EW.

If you do not know answers to all the questions, feel free to answer the ones you know the answer to.

Thanks in advance.

1) Who is Repairmaster?

2) Does Samsung offer a EW because I was only offered one by Best Buy?

3) Does anyone know if after 1 yr. when my Samsung Warranty runs out, if Best Buy offers the EW again?

I know from the past that when i have been offered EW later after not taking it out at purchase they were a lot more money.

4)Does anyone know if that is how it is with BestBuy?


One last question.

5) Does anyone know if Best Buy's EW for both parts and labor, if it is worth it, and will it cover the Light Engine replacement?

Thanks Gents for the info.

Just noticed a shadow problem tonight.

1" on left side.
HLR5668 purchased 08/17/05

Here is a pic

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/attac...id=71723&stc=1
IMG_1957sm.JPG

Lucky I bought the EW.

Calling them tomorrow.

Question: I had the set calibrated. Does this LE replacement (If thats what they do) require a recalibration?

Thanks,
Noz

Unfortunately it does. No way around it.

BTW: Been there, done that.

Noz, if I were you I would at least try and restore it to your calibrated values. It may be close enough, or at least might improve the picture. Take pictures of all your SM settings. Someone here had the tech install the original color wheel in the new LE. and then re entered the calibrated values for the CCA and Dnie and was pretty satisfied with the results.

This shadow problem seems to be epidemic. Good luck.

I'm getting the royal run around from Samsung Parts (J&J) and the only authorized service center for 200 miles. Samsung denies that the light tunnel is replaceable and the service center flat won't give me the part number. They don't want to miss out on the service but they also won't do house calls outside of a twenty mile radius of Albuquerque.
Are ther any sealed screws that would indicate it had been worked on? The service center claims that If I open it up the warranty will be voided.
TV is an HL-S5087Wxxx
Anybody have any ideas?
Thanks

I don't know about your set, but mgreen200 posted here that he ordered a light tunnel from Samsung Parts for $72.00. Perhaps he can give us the part number. Also, it is possible that it is not a replacable item for your model. Do you have the service manual?

Looking at the pictures of the Light Engine there does not appear to be any QC seals or paint dots on them. Lets hope that SS is not trying to force us to use outside service. It's your set and after the factory warranty runs out it's fair game for you to DIY! IMHO.

Last night I called Samsung customer service to check on why the LE that the Service Manager had found had not shown up. We were told about 8 days ago that it would be shipped to our repair shop and to check in with them after 8 days. This is the second time so far we have been told a LE is being shipped. We have not heard from the repair shop so I called Samsung. Anyway, Samsung customer care could not verify that it had been shipped. The told me to call the repair shop and have them track the part. I called the repair shop today and they were great. They had not heard that a part was being shipped and their last advice to Samsung was that our TV be swapped out. They called Samsung Parts and were told that no LE was ever shipped. They were out of stock and on backorder. They further told me here that these LEs we are getting are refurbished, so those new bulbs you think you are getting may be older than the one you gave up. They said it would be a while before any LEs were available as there are a lot of LEs on backorder.

So I call Samsung back again today hell bent on not getting off the phone till I got some kind of an answer. I am now told no LE was ever shipped. Basically, we were lied to to keep from having to replace our TV set and allow Samsung to gain some time to see if any LEs showed up. ARRRGGHHH!!! Now we are back to where we were 3 or so weeks ago. The case has been sent back to the Regional Service manager for him to review and decide what action to take. I tried to escalate the issue and was told there was no avenue for escalation within Samsung. The Regional Service manager "has no boss". I asked to talk to her supervisor and was told the same by the supervisor. They both flat out refused to forward me to their Executive Customer Relations Team. They said to call back after 48 business hours if we do not hear from them sooner. We are at 31 days without a TV and counting. I have no confidence that anything is being done and we have been lied to on many occasions.

My wife is contacting a news team out of San Francisco that has a great consumer advocacy team. We are going to report the issue and ask for their help. If any of you are having similar issues I will be glad to pass on your contact info to the team if you would like. You can shoot me any info at dbonham@pacbell.net. This has obviously become a widespread issue with the Samsung DLPs and Samsung does not seem to have the depth as a company to deal with the issues from their poor engineering. Maybe a little bad press during their 2007 product announcements will get some attention.

I saw no screws that were sealed when I disassembled my light enine. I have a light tunnel on order but it is currently on backorder. Part number is BP-6700218A
for my set. HLR-5078W Do a search for keyword light tunnel at Samsungparts.com

Since you have the 6168, I wonder if there is a different model number for my 6768? It would make sense that most LE's are identical and it's the geometry of the box that determines picture size? What was the part number?

Also, I noticed in your pictures the mirror that fell out was one of the upright mirrors. How long did they say you would have to wait for a new light tunnel? Big demand I bet!

Halco, sorry to disagree with you, but I really don't think that will work. I know it did not for me. That said, if you did want to keep the calibrated settings after a LE replacement DO NOT allow the tech to do the DMD->Digital transfer in the SM. This will preserve your calibrated settings. This is exactly what I did and tried the setup for awhile. I let the bulb burn in but the PQ was still pretty awful. Good thing is, you can do the DMD->Digital transfer at any time so if you end up not liking the results, you can do it yourself. That's what I did after I found out the calibrated settings just were not working for me.

If y'all need details on how to do this, let me know.

Reply to Satman's questions:

I have a few questions to ask about these EW.

If you do not know answers to all the questions, feel free to answer the ones you know the answer to.

Thanks in advance.

1) Who is Repairmaster?

Large extended warranty company (Link Here)

2) Does Samsung offer a EW because I was only offered one by Best Buy?

Yes

3) Does anyone know if after 1 yr. when my Samsung Warranty runs out, if Best Buy offers the EW again?

Don't know, I bought my TV from tvauthority.com

I know from the past that when i have been offered EW later after not taking it out at purchase they were a lot more money.

4)Does anyone know if that is how it is with BestBuy?

Don't know


One last question.

5) Does anyone know if Best Buy's EW for both parts and labor, if it is worth it, and will it cover the Light Engine replacement?

Don't know, but the Repairmaster is. I did not pay a dime to have my TV repaired the last time and it was handled by the same company that did the repairs for Samsung.

Reportando la misma falla en DLP Samsung SP-46L6HR alrededor de 3.5 cms de sombra (mancha) en el lado izquierdo de la pantalla, la adquirÃ* el 27 de marzo del 2006 totalmente nueva. Bastante molesto este problema, saludos de Toluca, Estado de México. ¿Acaso no hay control de calidad o pruebas antes de lanzar un producto?

Reporting the exactly same problem on my DLP Samsung SP-46L6HR, the evil shadow attacks again now here in Mexico, cheers everybody. I will take a picture soon. =(

To be fair I have been treated pretty well by Samsung and have had excellent service from the technician in my area. So far they have waved all costs for the repairs to my set on two occasions even while it was out of warranty. However I am concerned that they have not resolved this light engine problem and cannot assure me that it will not repeat itself again in a few more months (that will be my third repair for the same problem and 4th LE). They stated they did not have an answer to that but would deal with it like they have in my other cases, if it came up. To protect myself I will be considering purchasing an extended warranty for the remainder of the useful life of the set.

Its ashame because it appears that this is a very minor design or production problem do to an adhesive (or lack there of) holding a few mirrors in place. This one item is causing most of the issues that everyone has with these sets.

Check this story out.

I was told that by Sammy that if their contracted repair shop did not call me in 3 days to set up an appointment to call them. They even gave me their phone number. After 3 days I recieved no call, (which I expected) So I call them. I reached a lady at the repair shop that handles the warranties for Sammy TV'S in our area. I gave her the Transaction number that Sammy gave me and of course she had not recieved it from Sammy. I then told her where I lived and she told me that they do not travel that far. I told her that Sammy told me that they would find someone to travel that far to service me. She then said that she would call someone for me, and see if he would go that far to service me. She called back 10 minutes later and said they he would service me. I then told her about the shadow problem, and told her that from all my forum reading, that I believed my problem was the light engine. She told me that they have a ton of light engine problems with Sammy TV'S. She said she would order the light engine. (even though the serviceman had not even checked my TV to see if that was the problem) That tells me, this is a widespead problem also locally with Sammy TV'S. After reading several post about the problem people are having with backorder problems with Sammy's TV"S, I called the lady back and asked her if my part was on backorder. She told me that it was, and that if they did not recieve the LE in 3 weeks, that they could get Sammy to exchange my TV, which they have done on several occasions with them. She also said another lady called yesterday with the same model number, and had the same LE problem as mine. She ordered her a LG for her Sammy too. It is model HLS6187W.

My question to the forum is:

Do you think since my Sammy TV is only 7 months old Sammy will exchange the entire TV?

If so, do you think that would send me back to BestBuy, or ship it to the repair shop and have them deliver it, and take mine away with them?

If you have encountered this type of problem where a new TV was offered or exchanged, I would appreciate your reply.

Thanks, satman858

First off Sammy would generally only replace a TV when it cannot be fixed. This is almost impossible since most of the workings are in the light engine unit. There have been very few cases of people getting new TV's from SS. Generally when they have swapped every part in the TV and have not been able to resolve the problem, or in cases where they keep having to replace the same part over and over again.

If you did get a new TV it would not solve anything since the problem seems to be in many of the LE units. So you would just end up with the same problem later or would have just the same odds in getting it fixed with replacing the LE.

I would suspect that they have a huge backlog of LE's because they never expected this many to be returned at one time. They can only repair so many per month and clearly more are breaking than they expected.

I think we are going to have to wait this one out and see what materializes in terms of a fix for this problem. All of us thought we had a fix last summer, but now a number of us are seeing a return to the problem and we are seeing it show up in the HLS units too, because they are now reaching about the same use time that the HLR's did when they first had this problem early in 2006.

Good advice.
The tech came today and replaced my shadowed LE. I suggested that he not copy the dmd to digital as I wanted to evaluate the results for a while. He agreed and said "no problem". He took a look at Index delay and actuator gain and we decided that no adjustments were necessary either. As I said before, I kept my old LE, which I will repair some day. The picture results seemed to be very close to the calibrated state except for the intensity (a little harsh) of a new bulb. After it burns in, I will re evaluate everything and make adjustments.

I have to say here, that in my local, Samsung Service has been excellent and prompt. They were very easy to work with and the technician was quite knowledgable. This may not be the case every where and I can understand the concerns people are having with Samsung. I suggest that you hang in there and keep close contact with Samsung Repair. Be firm, and polite. I doubt that there have been many full set replacements. A new LE and an extended warranty equals long term peace of mind. No need for TV reporters here.

So what you guys are saying is that she lied about Samsung exchanging my unit?

When she told me that she said that a number of Samsung parts were discontinued and if my part was, that they would exchange my TV.

How long was your LE on order before the tech came back and put it in?