This is an odd article for a television repair company to publish, and we are aware of that. But we tell customers not to repair their televisions several times a week, and it seems more useful to explain the reasoning here than to make each person pay a callout fee to hear it.
The rule of thumb we actually use
If a repair costs less than roughly a third of what a comparable replacement would, repairing is clearly the better value. You keep a panel you already own, and you spend a fraction of the money. The two most common faults — power supply and backlight — comfortably meet this test.
Between a third and a half, it becomes a judgement call about the age of the set, the quality of the panel and how much life is realistically left in it.
Above half, buy a new television. We mean this, and we will tell you so.
The faults that are never worth repairing
A cracked or shattered panel. On a modern flat-screen the panel is the television — the majority of its cost and its physical structure. A replacement panel, priced as a spare part and shipped as an enormous fragile object, reliably costs more than a new set. We do not offer this repair, and neither does any reputable repairer.
OLED burn-in. Permanent, uneven degradation of the organic pixels. There is no repair. Not by us, not by the manufacturer, not by anybody. Pixel-refresh cycles clear temporary image retention, which looks similar and is not the same thing.
Multiple simultaneous board failures. When the power supply, the mainboard and the T-CON have all gone, the set is telling you something. Usually it is that it has spent years cooking itself in a cabinet with no airflow.
An expensive board on a small, cheap, old television. A mainboard on a seven-year-old 32-inch set can easily approach what the whole thing is worth. That is not a repair; it is a donation.
The faults that almost always ARE worth repairing
And this is the other half of the argument, which usually gets lost. A television that will not switch on is nearly always a power supply board, and that is cheap. A black screen with perfect sound is nearly always a backlight, and that is cheap too. A set stuck on the logo is nearly always corrupted firmware, and that costs nothing in parts at all.
In every one of those cases, the panel — the part you actually paid for — is in perfect health. Replacing the entire television because of a failed capacitor is an expensive way to solve a cheap problem, and a genuinely wasteful one.
One thing worth remembering
A good five-year-old panel very often outperforms a cheap new one at the same price. Replacing rather than repairing is sometimes a downgrade that you paid for. Ask what you are actually buying.
And if you do replace it
Please recycle it properly. A television contains materials that should not go to landfill, and there are registered e-waste facilities in every major centre. We do not buy broken televisions, and we cannot take yours — but do not put it in a skip.
