Housekeeping

My TV is broke (a bleg)

By July 17, 2010No Comments

So, my lovely Hitachi P50V701 plasma tele­vi­sion, which I bought in October of 2007 (as some of you may recall), star­ted act­ing pecu­li­ar recently, as in, stopped work­ing. It began with the HDMI 1 input; just as I had begun watch­ing the Blu-ray of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, the screen went black, and the front-panel blue power light began flash­ing. The oth­er two HDMI inputs con­tin­ued to func­tion, so I switched. But soon enough, with ever input, the same thing began hap­pen­ing: a pic­ture for a few minutes, then a blank screen and a flash­ing blue power light. A chat with a Hitachi rep res­ul­ted in my spend­ing about 30 bucks to buy the gee­gaws neces­sary to per­form a soft­ware update on the set, which not only did­n’t actu­ally work, but I don’t think really happened. In any event, I have to get the set fixed before I worry about that issue, because this is clearly NOT a soft­ware prob­lem. (Web explor­a­tion sug­gests it’s a power sup­ply prob­lem, and not par­tic­u­larly chal­len­ging. And so I pray.) So my ques­tion is: do any of my read­er in the New York City area have any POSITIVE exper­i­ences with TV repair out­lets they can actu­ally recom­mend? Because read­ing the online reviews of the two joints cited by the Hitachi per­son on the phone, I am frankly ter­ri­fied. Any oth­er advice on the sub­ject would also be appre­ci­ated. I need to get the July Blu-ray Consumer Guide done in, you know, July. And there’s some ostens­ibly pay­ing work I do that requires a work­ing dis­play as well. Many thanks in advance. 

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No Comments

  • Escher says:
    July 17, 2010 at 8:09 am

    call Analogique and find out if they do plasma repair– they’ve been amaz­ing at keep­ing my audio equip­ment in prop­er work­ing con­di­tion, and they really know what they’re doing.
    addi­tion­ally, while I’ve not brought them any­thing to fix, I got a very good impres­sion from the electronics-fixit guy who has a stall bur­ied in the south­east­ern quad­rant of the Essex Street Market, so ask around, or walk over and see what he can do for you.

  • cmasonwells says:
    July 17, 2010 at 11:47 am

    Sounds like the TV hated CHLOE as much as every­one else.

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    July 17, 2010 at 1:10 pm

    I have no advice to offer, but good luck, Glenn. I can think of a few organs I’d rather have fail before my plasma TV!

  • Evelyn Roak says:
    July 17, 2010 at 1:29 pm

    Lester March does good repair work.

  • Phil Freeman says:
    July 17, 2010 at 1:38 pm

    Just be thank­ful you did­n’t have to sit through any more than a few minutes of Chloe.

  • warren oates says:
    July 17, 2010 at 2:09 pm

    Glenn, sorry about your TV and hope you get it fixed soon. To all the Chloe bash­ers: have you ever seen an Atom Egoyan film oth­er than The Sweet Hereafter? Although it’s a remake of a French film, Chloe is them­at­ic­ally more like Egoyan’s earli­er fea­tures – Family Viewing, Speaking Parts and Exotica. Old-style Egoyan in a more stream­lined main­stream nar­rat­ive with bet­ter look­ing act­ors. The storytelling is less avant garde, but the story is no less strange or com­pel­ling. It held my atten­tion the whole time and I had no idea what would hap­pen next. Far bet­ter than the dis­aster of Where The Truth Lies and the awk­ward semi return to form of Adoration.

  • Phil Freeman says:
    July 17, 2010 at 10:00 pm

    I’ve seen a bunch of Egoyan movies. I’ve also seen a bunch of movies late Saturday nights on Cinemax. Based on Chloe, so has Egoyan. It held my atten­tion, too, but in a slow-motion car-crash sort of way; as I said to a real live per­son after it was over, it’s amaz­ing what an act­ress will do when she’s con­vinced her­self she’s mak­ing art.

  • Stephen Bowie says:
    July 18, 2010 at 1:58 am

    Well, NATHALIE was pretty ridicu­lous to begin with, so what was any­one expect­ing? Although, my plasma TV played NATHALIE, at least.…

  • EOTW says:
    July 19, 2010 at 8:13 am

    Getting ready to buy my first HDTV. haven’t owned a set in over 10 years. Probably going with a 42 inch. On a budget over here. get­ting the BD play­er, sound bar/woofer setup. I’ve earned it.
    IMO, Egoyan has­n’t made a decent pi since SWEET HEREAFTER.

  • jim emerson says:
    July 19, 2010 at 2:56 pm

    I got my HD Sony Bravia from Best Buy (they matched a sale price from anoth­er loc­al mer­chant) just in case some­thing went wrong, which it did. I was sur­prised, how­ever, that when I called their “Geek Squad,” they were able to dia­gnose the prob­lem over the phone (by hav­ing me report the sequence of blink­ing lights), order the part, and send some­body over to install it. (Fortunately, my TV was still under war­ranty at the time.) I don’t know if that will help you, but I thought I’d pass it along just in case…

  • James Keepnews says:
    July 19, 2010 at 4:00 pm

    I’m also rather mys­ti­fied over Egoyan’s list­ing away from his greatest films – with the excep­tion of CALENDAR and the not-as-good THE ADJUSTER, all mostly lis­ted by Mr. Oates – and increas­ingly more in the dir­ec­tion of Jess Franco in his last two films. His very strong work from the 80’s up to the turn of the cen­tury and the things that made that work so dis­tinct­ive – the grace­ful intim­acy with which he engages his char­ac­ters in each of these films, the mod­ern issues they them­selves engage which are slowly revealed with almost none of the clumsy expos­i­tion one expects from Current Hollywood Produkt, and the inex­or­able momentum the nar­rat­ives devel­op­ment as they move towards uneasy res­ol­u­tions – were well on dis­play and mem­or­ably real­ized right up to THE SWEET HEREAFTER. Thereafter…it’s a dodgy affair. I actu­ally enjoyed FELICIA’S JOURNEY almost as a genre exer­cise on his part – the seri­al killer film done as a taste­ful drawing-room drama of man­ners – but there was­n’t alot that matched his past feli­city and intim­acy, nor the epic size of the deeply per­son­al sub­ject mat­ter, in the unfor­tu­nate wash-out that was ARARAT. The Christopher Plummer cus­toms agent scenes had some of the tang and loom­ing unease of Egoyan’s best early work but the most epic-sized any­thing in that film had to be Bruce Greenwood’s well-prepared-actor char­ac­ter­’s self-righteous ego, school­ing Eric Bogosian about what a true artist does on and off the set. And since then…Skinemax city, bi-sexual three­somes and, com­pared to his past work, not extremely fresh insights into star­dom, infi­del­ity, you name it.
    Bummer, eh?