Hi guys! I'm down in the garbage room in the basement of the EEVblog corporate towers here. Check it out. We Have a box. Samsung Smart TV.

What Is it a 55 inch? LED TV? An Empty box, nothing in it. But... Tada! Behind It, we have what looks like an old Samsung plasma. TV! Definitely Worth grabbing.

Hmm, wonder if it works. Maybe not. Eh, we'll find out. And I've got to tell you, the thing weighs an absolute ton.

I don't know, like 50 kilos or something. So I Got the trolly out, put some tape around it, and we'll lug it back to the lab.. It's 2005 Vintage, if you can have a look down here, September 2005 Plasma. Anyway, we'll have a look at it when we get back to the lab.

Even If it doesn't work, if it's got like a dead plasma display or something,, ah well,, scrap it for parts! And We're back in the lab, and geeze, this thing is bloody heavy. Let Me tell you,, it's got to be ahh, 40 to 50 kilos or something like that. Incredible difference compared to the LCD monitors these days. Let's take a look at the label here.

It's a PS42S5H Samsung-- well, it's the 5HX I guess, slash XSA. I Have no idea if it's a good one or not. I mean 380 watts, man, you've got to be kidding me, Geeze.! I Fly to Alpha Centauri with 380 watts! Absolutely Incredible. Manufactured September 2005, made in Korea.

That'd be South Korea. And Yeah,, it's got true surround, blah blah blah blah blah. Let's take a look. Not Exactly, you know, feature-- well,, it is for the time I guess, but it's only got a single HDMI input, regular AV-- composite AV in and out, S-Video, and it does have two component inputs, which is pretty good.

And Of course, an analog tuner,. they wouldn't have had digital tuners in them back then. So Anyway--, there's the model code, serial number. Now I am presuming it does not work.

Because These plasmas,. they're notorious, not O-- not just this model of Samsung, but just all plasmas in general, notorious for failing. And There's of course, the famous plasma Graveyard, as they-- as TV service techs or people in the industry like to call it, where all these dead plasmas go to die. They're just been overtaken by LCDs.

They weren't a very reliable technology at all. So I'd be very surprised if it works, so hopefully it doesn't work and we can at least have an attempted repair. But Even if it's faulty and I have a go at repairing it here, I Don't like my chances. Because usually-- well,, in a lot of cases it's the panel itself, and they're very expensive to replace these things unless you can junk another of the same model unit.

And I Can see huge big power supplies in there. It's going to be really good. So, umm, I guess let's power it up and see what this turd does. Alright Here we go folks..

Let's power this thing up. It's-- like it doesn't come with a stand. Unfortunately,, it's just got like this separate speaker system with-- that looks like the power button there. But Sort of like it's hinged separately from the main display down here.

So It's kind of weird. So Without a stand, it doesn't stand up-- well,, it doesn't stand up at all actually.. Anyway, let's plug it in. here.

we go.. Whoa, hey. Hey, we have a blue ringed light down the bottom, that's a good sign. But-- so at least it's gotten through the soft power system, and it is starting up.

So Let's give it a go. Hey, I Just heard the relays go click click click. Very co-- whoa! I Saw something. I saw something! Oh flicker.

Check It out! It works! It's alive! Incredible. I Didn't expect this sucker to work! I Expected there to be some sort of problem with it. Now I Don't have the remote, but the buttons are on the side down here. Let's-- I Mean, this is, of course, for you young whipper-snappers who haven't seen this before, There's some of the cosmic background radiation here, okay? This is just noise being picked up from the analog tuner, of course.

So Let's press the menu key. Hey, look at that. Menu key, we're in. How Do you do it? I Can't believe this thing works! Huh.

Alright, how do you...? Channel button, there we go.. Check It out! This Thing seems to work just fine. How do we get into there. I Guess we press the bottom button, yeah, we're in.

Blue screen. Oh Let's turn the blue screen on, shall we? Let's see if I can press "on". Hey, there we go.. Hey, look at that, look at that.

Let's turn the menu off there, so we've got all blue. How do you... Yeah, you just press it a couple of times. And Look at that, look at that folks..

That, looks pretty shmick! Cannot believe-- well,, they tossed out this fully-working 42 in-- well, presumably fully-working, I Don't know if the sound works, haven't tried that yet. But The video seems to work just fine. At least the inbuilt stuff. So I'm going to hook this up to the notebook, and see if we can use it as say, a PC display or something.

Alright, the notebook's hooked up, it's detected it because it's gone into the different aspect ratio, so. I've just set my camera to shutter priority one sixth of a second, otherwise you're getting flickering on the display there. So You'll notice my hand is really quite blurry now. There We go.

But I-- the PC input does not seem to work. Because I'm sure the PC's outputting something, I can get another monitor. I've got a whole bunch of monitors here in the lab, not a problem. But-- Because the source list here.

It seems that they've been-- it's already been set. so they've disabled the AV, the S-Video, the components, and the HDMI. So It looks like whoever was using this, was just using it for the TV or the PC input. So Maybe that's what's wrong with it.

The PC Input has failed. But Presumably, the other inputs work, perhaps.. There You go, I'm back to normal shutter mode now, and you can see the flicker on the plasma display there. And I've got it hooked up to another little 15 inch Samsung, I actually scored 5 of these fully working from the garbage room as well,.

That was an excellent dumpster dive.. And I Actually want to do umm-- like a video wall with 5 of these in series, like actually-- I've taken the stands off them and put like 5 of them across and actually drive them with an FPGA or something like that. Do Something novel with them. So I Want to do that, but anyway,, it shows that the cable and everything's fine, but this sucker doesn't seem to be doing the business on the VGA input, which is a real-- bit of a disappointment, but apart from that, seems to work.

Well I've tried another couple of sources here,, component video and also an S-Video source, and nothing! Those Inputs automatically detect, by the way,, so it's seeing that there's signal there, but it doesn't seem to be processing it at all. So There does seem to something wrong with this thing, and that's probably why they tossed it out. I guess. They Were using it with some sort of external signal and well,, yeah,, it's failed.

Alright Let's crack it open, shall we? And I Don't think I'm going to have a huge amount of time to work on it today, but want to at least have a look in it. So Yeah,, that's well,, I'm not a TV service tech, but that is a rather unusual fault I would have thought. That All of the display processing stuff seems to work fine, yet it doesn't accept-- yeah,, all this has to come off, alright. It doesn't accept any external inputs.

Which is rather weird I would have thought. If Anyone knows any better? Please leave it in the comments. So It looks like we can just pop off this little panel here, just for the processor board, because that's where the inputs are anyway. Umm, although we might take off the rest of it, because there's a lot of goodness in here.

I Mean,, even if this thing didn't work,, well worth just scrapping for the boards and the parts, really.. Yeah, the screws on that DE9-- DE15 are holding it down. Tada! There We go! There's our main processor board. So If there's gonna be a fault with this thing,, it's going to be on here.

I mean maybe it's user-- maybe I'm not just using the thing, right,? but I though, well, you put the signal in the external inputs and you select the external inputs, it should work! But Let's have a look at this main processor board. Alright, we have a Samsung BGA chipset here labeled STP22, another Samsung DNIe, that's the processor, that's their-- I Think one of their whiz-bang you know,, display technology, custom algorithmey chipset type things. And Well,, we've got our tuner over here, we've got all out inputs mounted on the one board. I Sort of didn't expect to see that, I sort of expected.

Maybe a-- a separate board for all that, perhaps.. But There's a lot of electrolytics on here. I Mean,, look at all these surface-mount electrolytics. There's an absolute ton of them.

And These are rather unusual looking-- ahh! I Was going to say, they're rather unusual looking caps, but they're not. They're actually inductors. Let's take a look. And There they are there.

At First glance,, you might actually think they're caps. You Can see a cap behind it, but of course the dead giveaway is that it's got no vent on the top of it. If You have a look at the-- at a regular cap here,, it's got the vent for the external pressure there, to vent the pressure. But These ones don't, of course,, and there you go, 10 microhenries.

But They're a rather unusual looking inductors. Now All of these caps around here, they're obviously coupling caps, If you have a look at just the way they're arranged, they're, you know,, all bunched together there, sort of like all coming from the various inputs here, so they're just AC coupling caps there. Because They're not decoupling, you know you can't-- you're not just gonna spread them out like that on a board just for decoupling. That's crazy.

But There's an absolute ton of them. Check it out. Check out all these surface mount electros. Man.

Metric buttload. And There's the HDMI interface chip, it's a Silicon Image TMDS panel link chipset. And You can see there's the-- there you go, it's all coupling down there into the HDMI connector. And What else have we got? We've got another Samsung custom part.

No idea what that sucker is. And Na-- N306-- I Don't know. off from the top of my head. It's upside down, all the electrons are going to fall out.

Another one that's upside down is the main Samsung BGA there. Digital-- DNIe. I Think it's digital noise, something or other. There's the other large quad flat pack.

Samsung DNIe SDP43, and this is the STP22. So It looks like it's a dual chipset there, doing all that magic. And We've got ourselves a Philips chipset, of course. Philips make a ton of TV and video chips.

SAA 7119 I believe. Not Going to bother looking that one up,, but obviously some sort of input channel, you know,, sort of input processing for all the various-- or switching or something like that for all the various external inputs. And There's a Micronlas NSP44106 I believe. Once Again,, no idea-- I Have no idea that one, a big, fancy looking N.

NSP 6241A. Sorry for going all handheld today, folks,, it's not easy to get this thing-- I've got it sitting on the floor and you know, I Just couldn't be bothered getting the tripod into position and doing all this sort of stuff.. So It's just much easier to do the old handheld job around here,, but there's nothing obvious at fault, of course. I Can't really see anything on here at all, no blown caps, no blown parts or anything like that.

I don't know. And As I've discussed in a previous video on DIP wave soldering on this thing,, this board has been reflow soldered. Of course,, all the parts are reflow soldered clearly,, using modern reflow soldering techniques. But Of course, the big connectors and stuff down here, they're all wave soldered.

And The way you can tell that without even taking the board off is Tada! There it is, it says DIP with an arrow. So Obviously the board travels through that direction, like that, through the wave soldering machine. So All of the through-hole stuff on the bottom gets wave soldered as a second process. Now Down here we've got a Maxim MAX232, so that's right next to the service input jack here, so obviously it's a serial interface service jack, and I'm sure anyone who services these TVs will know all about that, because I don't.

So There's really not much in terms of I/O happening here. I Mean here's our output going to the panel, that's our digital sig-- whoop, digital signal output. That comes off far too easily. Anyway, that's the digital output to our panel, then we've got I don't know, a couple of control stuff over here, one shielded cable going off here, I Don't think that's audio because that would be going down to the speakers.

Something else, I Don't know why we've got all that multi-- ribbon cable there just to go down to this speaker assembly,, speaker and switch assembly. I'm not sure what's happening there. And You'll notice the shielding tape they've got along the edge of this, so they're serious about their EMI, keeping it out and keeping it in. And Aha! Under here.

I Took this whole panel off and this is why we need this ribbon cable going down here, because it drives these. LEDs It also has, presumably, the infrared, Yep, there we go,. there's our little Samsung power button on the front there. And Let's have a look...

Yep,, there we go.. There's our infrared receiver. And our blue LEDs to light up the ring. So that just goes into-- this all acts-- this plastic assembly here acts as a light pipe.

And Yes, the LEDs sort of go into that outer ring. So Forming like that blue ringed light pipe effect. So Yeah,, that's why we need so many wires going over to that board. And It looks like that's probably an ambient light sensor right there to detect the ambient light, and of course, the on/off soft power button in the middle.

And The other connector, of course, is just for our left and right speakers. They're-- nothing much happening here. They've got acoustic port, bit of acoustic voodoo there. And, well, geeze.

I Don't know, it's not terribly exciting. I mean, you know,, there's a ton of technology which goes into that board. I mean it's just phenomenal. And That's the thing, I Mean as you know, Samsung You know,, one of the major players in the semiconductor industry.

And Of course they do their own custom silicon. They've got no less than 3 devices on here which are Samsung branded. And They just wouldn't rebrand those, they'd be churning their own silicon for those, and manufacturing. And I Know everyone's not going to be happy until I Lift the skirt on this thing.

So I Think I've taken out all the screws so let's give it a go.. Yep. Tada! Look at that. Yeah baby, whew! And This is why you-- if you get one of these, even if the panel is faulty folks,, great opportunity to scrap parts out of this thing.

Look at all the power stuff which you do not find in LCD TVs these days. It's just-- these plasma. TVs Totally different high-power technology. Aww, look at all the heatsinks and Power components.

Love it.. Let's go around and have a look at a few things at random, shall we? Check It out,. they've got some more tape here, shielding tape connecting this chassis to the outer chassis down in there, nice.. We've got our mains input filter, they've got actually a proper mains input filter there.

Nicely Earth tied off to a dedicated post down in there with a shakeproof washer. Really Like it. And Of course that goes over to our main power board here. And It's an interesting mix of technology they've got here.

This is a double-sided almost exclusively-- yeah,, it looks like entirely through-hole components, all DIP stuff, of course. And This one down here is a combination of DI-- you know,, through-hole connectors with, you know,, some fairly modern, advanced reflow stuff. And Then this board over here has been shopped out to a Dong Yang Instrument Corporation, and it's just a, you know,, low-cost single-sided phenolic- based board. It's not even a proper fibreglass board.

And The other boards over here. for the other sides of the drivers, these are predominantly-- That one's a mix of surface-mount and predominantly through-hole there. And Of course we've got some chip-on-board or BGA components down here for the drivers with the heatsinks stuck on top, with-- they're gunked all the way around the outside. So Interesting mix of boards here.

But Check out this power board. I Mean this thing is absolutely massive. I see some labeling over the other side we'll take a look at in a minute. But The first thing you notice is-- check out those teeth in there.

That is not going to bite your hand off, that one's for surge protection. Of course, it's a spark gap. It's designed to-- so that's why it's exposed, that's why you've got your exposed gold copper like that. And the little sharp points.

Because Any high voltage transients coming in from the mains should, in theory, jump over those gaps first and dissipate the surge energy that way, in the spark gap. But they've got some MOVs there. Check out these huge chokes. Absolutely Massive monsters.

We've got some HR-- two HRC fuses down in there,, so it looks like they've fused both lines. Then We've got some massive bridge rectifiers here, two of them. Monsters. And We've got our switching transform-- well,, we've got quite a few switching transformers down in here.

They would have spared no expense on those. What Have we got down in here. We have-- see if we can get up there. It's a 20N60, that's a high-voltage power MOSFET down in there.

Couple of other devices sharing the same heatsink. All Isolated from the heatsink, of course,, you can see the Silpad down in there. And We've got our high-voltage caps here. They're our mains-rated caps.

They'd be smoothing the DC coming out of this puppy. And A lot more devices. Couple of power resistors down in there. Couple of huge more-- we'll look at the brand, can't quite see it from here,, but we'll go around to the other side and take a look.

Some Lower voltage supplies-- switching supplies down in there. And There you have it.. Samxon brand, not exactly the world's best brand there. 105 degree C rated, looks like the HP model.

Not Going to look up the datasheet for those suckers. Same one over here as well. 270 microfarads, 450 volts. These ones are 470 microfarads, 275 volts.

And Here's all our output voltages here on this convenient table. I Like it. VS there on the left hand side, 200 volts at 1.5 amps, geeze, there's 300 watts right there, folks.. 70 volts times? point seven amps, what's that? Another 50 watts.

And All the rest just make up the dregs there. But Geeze,, yeah. This Thing is,, you know,, as it said on the back panel, I think, what was it? 380 volts-- 380 watts. sorry,, consumption.

Not Sure if it actually draws that in operation,, but it's certainly capable of all that power. So There's one beast of a board. And You can see the isolation in the power supply too,, and that's identified by this big thick silkscreen here, which goes underneath the optocouplers there. You Can see the optocouplers feeding back, and it goes through here, this transformer,, and obviously these switching transformers here.

Some More Optocouplers down in there. So All this stuff around here is obviously mains primary side, and all the stuff down on this side is "low voltage", well, 200 volts. but it's the isolated side of the power supply. And Interestingly, it did have a fan-- a supply dedicated for the fan there, and it's got some connectors down in here which are labeled fan as well.

But They've obviously left them out, they decided that this particular model didn't need the fans. And On this board here,, more dodgy cap-- this we got Samwha brand caps over here. Well They're certainly not going to use Panasonic are they? And Down here, we have our main X driver board and you might think "aha,, look at these ribbon cables, just you know,, multiway ribbon cables". but you take a look at them and they're not.

There's just one chunky bit of copper there. They're-- these are not ribbon cables, these are high current flex cables. And They're used-- all the copper in there and all the pins on that connector for the high current interface. Because This is the main X supply-- I Mean here's our horizontal driving board all the way over there, and on this side is the other return for that.

And These are extremely high current, you know, high power, because it's got to take all of the channels that are coming from the X side. And Check out the huge traces that they've got in there.. I mean all those pins on that connector. they're all shorted together under there, all connected through,.

Look at all the via stitching there, lots of heavy via stitching, solder-filled as well. All The way over here. So All of those, you can see all 3 are actually connected together. They're all on the same trace, there it is..

Goes All the way through here, through here, and over to there. And We've got some inductors here inside some heat-shrink. Little exposed couple of turn inductor down in there. Huge big-ass heatsink here.

So The power devices would be underneath there. And Another couple of little tiny heatsinks for those two devices there. Right next to the caps, geeze. You know.

And Here's our column board, and I'm not sure if it's like the whole length of this, I Doubt it.. I think they've-- they split it up, but it comes out the other side there. So I'm not going to take all this metalwork and all this stuff here off, it's not really worth our while. And Here's a label here, Rev 2.0 NTSC and PAL, and it's telling you what the various power supply voltages have to be set at.: And Of course all of these boards have some sort of wave soldering on them like this one's got, you know,, quite a lot of through-hole, so there's our direction arrow for our wave soldering machine.

But Even this board here, which you don't think has really any through-hole components on it, well, it does!. It's got the connectors right here. So That one will also have the Direction Arrow for the wave soldering machine. And On our main power supply board here,, here are our main caps.

And I Mean look how close, there's only like 5 millimetres gap between that main heatsink for the high voltage switch-- switching MOSFETS down there. So I'm not sure how hot that gets, but that's a decent size heatsink, and those caps are certainly not going to be kept cool. So That's not good for their life. But This thing does still seem to work.

So I Guess it hasn't been a problem on this particular unit. And Of course, these things are so big-ass heavy that it needs this huge bracing going across here,. and here's some mounting holes from the back panel there. But It needs all that bracing in there -- there's two of them -- just to keep the whole thing from collapsing in on itself.

So Yes,, I Suspect this column driver board here is probably split in half at the middle there, because that's, you know,, probably as big as you'd want to make a board. In Terms of the panel size from the bare-board manufacturer and also what your assembly machine can handle as well. But In the horizontal direction they can usually handle, you know,, quite large sizes. But Your bare-board manufacturer, I Mean, you can get quite-- a board that's like a metre long like that.

But You need to go to a specialist manufacturer and you do pay a premium. So That would almost certainly be split in the middle like that, two separate boards for each half of the columns on the entire display. And Once again, on this horizontal power driver board, over here, all the major power components,, they're under the heatsinks there. So We can't see what they are.

Real-- you'd have to rip out the whole board and get at the screws from underneath and take it all off, and there'd probably be some heatsink compound that'd get all ugly. So We're not going to go that far today. But Here's our horizontal drivers, as I said before. These are-- they're probably chip-on-board or BGA or something like that.

And These are-- you can see multi-way ribbons. And If you counted those up, they would be-- I'm not sure what that panel is, I Think it's 720p, so do the math. And We've got 2, 4,, 6 of those for the entire number of vertical rows. So 720 divided by 6 is 120.

So I Don't know,, someone want to count those up for us? If You're watching this in. HD There should be 120-plus conductors in there. And If you're curious to see the connector solution they've got in there,, there it is.. I Have no idea who the manufacturer of that one is, if it's custom of an off-the-shelf job.

Not Entirely sure, but a, you know, it's a dual-- it's a dual-sided one, of course. And All of those traces coming from the driver chips there. And Once again, for the column drivers, you can do the math on the number of connectors there. I'm not sure how many total across here,, but you can-- it's probably a 1280 by 720 panel.

And There's the label for the Samsung plasma display panel. Made in Korea Of course,, and they would have manufactured that themselves,. There you go. First of the ninth, 2005.

Serial Number and all the power requirements just for the panel itself. So There you go,. that was quite a decent find in the dumpster. I think.

I'm-- I'm not going to troubleshoot it today, don't have enough time, and there could be nothing wrong with it. Maybe it's just a PEBCAK error and I'm just doing something stupid. But yeah, I can't-- it doesn't seem to be a normal fault, having-- you know,, not being a-- like, actually the panel, everything working, all the high voltage stuff, all the panel drivers, all working the panel itself, all that stuff usually goes. I mean, I didn't expect that to work, and then not be able to feed in a signal.

So I don't know what's happening there. Maybe I've just got to RTFM perhaps. But-- shouldn't-- I don't know. If Anyone's got any idea what's happening there? Please leave it in the comments.

But I'll spend some more time on this, try and put it to some decent use at least, maybe it'll even replace our busted Panasonic plasma at home, which I did a video on ages ago. No I Didn't ever repair that one, because it was the actual panel at fault. So Very costly to-- well, the panel module itself, so very costly to fix that thing. And I Was afraid that would be the problem with this one.

But the panel module in this seems just fine, so. Yeah! It's quite a score from the old dumpster. I Like it! Dumpster-diving, works every time. I Hope you like the quick look inside these plasma.

TVs. I mean they're still making them. As far as I know,, you can at least still buy Samsung plasmas at your local retailer, at least here in Australia. So I Presume they're still making them, but I'm not sure how much longer plasma TVs are going to be around really.

I mean it's like-- you can get a 51 inch-- I Mean this is a 42 inch, you can get a 51 inch for, you know, I-- what is it, 5, 6 hundred dollars or something. And that's the same brand, Samsung these days. I'm not sure how much this would have cost, maybe 2 or 3 grand easily back in 2005. But Like these are so massively high-powered.

Look at all the high-power electronics in here. It's just beautiful from a teardown and salvage point of view. You Can really get some useful parts out of these things, from the high-voltage power section. So Anyway,, if you want to discuss it,, jump on over to the EEVblog forum, that is the best place to do it.

That's where everyone hangs out. And, well, this wasn't a Teardown Tuesday, was it? No, this was a dumpster diving day! I Just happened to find this in the dumpster. And of course I Couldn't help but take the back off the thing. So Anyway,, if you like dumpster diving, please give it a big thumbs up.

And Hopefully, I'll try and find some more stuff in the old dumpster and give it a look. Catch you next time! captioned by Sen.