What I've learned, plasma display repair division

So. As reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog know, as of the middle of July my 50-inch plasma dis­play went on the fritz, and it took almost four god­damn months to get it fixed. And right after I got it fixed, it seemed to go on the fritz again. This was not per­man­ent, although it was wor­ry­ing, and now whenev­er I turn the tele­vi­sion on I’m wor­ried that instead of get­ting a pic­ture I’m going to see the symp­toms that first tipped me off to the fact that there was some­thing wrong. Yes, no pic­ture being one of them. I thought, though, now that I’m in a rel­at­ively not-as-insecure about being-able-to-watch-stuff space, I’d share some of my exper­i­ence so that you, dear read­er, may be able to avoid the hassle and expense I went through.

1) Get The Fullest Warranty Available. I did not do this. If I had had, say, a three-year war­ranty, this shit would have been covered. Instead, I paid through the nose. Not that such war­ranties are cheap, or look cheap; that’s why people don’t neces­sar­ily opt for them. My advice there­fore would be that when you’re con­tem­plat­ing the pur­chase of such an item, leave room in your budget itself for an exten­ded warranty—a couple of hun­dred bucks or so. You’ll thank me, spe­cific­ally, for it later.

2) A Good Surge Protector Is Not Enough. I have one, it was­n’t cheap. Now, this relates to what pre­cisely the prob­lem was with my set to begin with, so let me back­track a little. One after­noon in July, as I settled in to watch Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, because I love Art Cinema so much, I was zip­ping through the Sony trail­ers and all of a sud­den the pic­ture went out, and the blue power light at the front of the set star­ted blink­ing. In short order I dis­covered that this prob­lem was isol­ated to the first HDMI input of three on the dis­play. So I shunted my HDMI inputs around—putting the one from my amp/receiver into HDMI 2, and the one from the cable box into HDMI FRONT—and calmly star­ted look­ing into my paper­work on the set, where to call for ser­vice, etc. In short order the same thing happened with HDMI 2—no pic­ture or sound, flash­ing blue power light—and HDMI FRONT. I did­n’t even both­er with the com­pon­ent video ins because what’s the frig­ging point any­way (in due time I found they were not respond­ing either). Anyway, I called Hitachi and they gave me the num­bers of two author­ized repair cen­ters. The first guy I spoke to con­firmed what I had sus­pec­ted, based on my online research—my power sup­ply board had some­how burned out. “I know that set well,” the fel­low said. “You have to under­stand, these big screen dis­plays, essen­tially they’re like big com­puters. Their cir­cuitry is pretty much the same.” However. The gen­tle­man asked me if I had a surge pro­tect­or. Yes, I did. “I don’t mean a power strip,” he said. Yes, I knew that. Okay. And did I have my cable box plugged in to the same surge pro­tect­or as the plasma dis­play. I did. Well. Apparently, this was a bad thing. A cable box—particularly a cable box com­ing from my very own cable sup­pli­er, apparently—behaves in elec­tric and elec­tron­ic ways that can wreak hav­oc on the afor­men­tioned computer-like cir­cuitry of a plasma dis­play. Who knew? I sure as fuck did­n’t, or else I nev­er would have plugged the two units into the same surge pro­tect­or, right?

3) Know Your Rights. I did­n’t, and still don’t, but you do hear all sorts of things. Such as, that it’s fed­er­al law for a com­pany to main­tain a read­ily avail­able stock of parts for these items in the event that they need fix­ing, rather than keep­ing them in fuck­ing Japan from whence they are appar­ently nev­er sent and where even were they sent they’d be likely to be held up in cus­toms any god­damn way. Had I con­firmed this, you can bet your bot­tom dol­lar, or whatever oth­er cliché obscure ana­chron­ist­ic item you care to cite, that I woulda been yelling and scream­ing at the Better Business Bureau for some time. As it was, I cer­tainly gave an ear­ful to the poor folks at Hitachi cus­tom­er ser­vice, every now and then telling them that I really did­n’t want to write an art­icle for pub­lic­a­tion in a major magazine entitled “My Hitachi Plasma Repair Nightmare.” They really did­n’t know quite what to make of that. In any event, the end res­ult of my bitch­ing is that I did­n’t have to pay for the even­tu­ally rebuilt part and I would­n’t have had to pay for the new power board had it ever shown up. Not that the labor was­n’t expensive. 

It’s also import­ant for you to pay atten­tion dur­ing the pro­cess. If your prob­lem gets assigned a case num­ber by the com­pany or by the ser­vice cen­ter, write it down and keep it at hand; it’ll make your calls for updates go that much more smoothly. Try to take detailed notes of each call so you’ll know where you left off and what was prom­ised or implied. Get the name of the rep­res­ent­at­ive who you spoke to. If one of them had been par­tic­u­larly help­ful or sym­path­et­ic, ask for them the next time you call. And so on.

4) Check Everything. When the new power board had been put in, the repair guy and I looked at it for over ten minutes—and yes, the Blu-ray disc WAS Mars Attacks—and we were all like, “Okay.” And he left. And a day or so later the pic­ture went out and the blue light star­ted flash­ing as I began watch­ing the new Blu-ray of The Exorcist. And I almost had a stroke. And I went to the back of the set to power it down. And I saw that the TV repair­man HAD PLUGGED THE DISPLAY INTO THE POWER STRIP THAT I HAD PUT THE PLUG FOR THE CABLE BOX INTO, AND NOT THE SURGE PROTECTOR THAT NOW NO LONGER HAD THE CABLE BOX PLUGGED INTO IT. And I almost had a stroke again. I plugged the plasma into the surge pro­tect­or, did the HDMI input step-up again, and watched the set through the week­end, wait­ing fir the remain­ing two inputs to fail. (I was some­how reminded of the first time HAL sends Dave out­side the space ship to fix some­thing in 2001: A Space Odyssey.) And they did­n’t. I had sched­uled a return vis­it from the TV repair place, and this time they were gonna lug the set back to their facil­ity to fig­ure out just what the fuck the deal was, but since the oth­er inputs had­n’t failed the whole week­end through, on the morn­ing of the appoint­ment I thought I’d retry HDMI 1 and see what would hap­pen. And watched the entirety of Forbidden Planet without incid­ent. AND it looked great. So. That’s where we stand now. A new Blu-ray Consumer Guide is in the works.