Help! Samsung DLP died

[acre]

Sorry up front for writing a novel here, but I didnt want to leave anything out!

So my Samsung HL-R5067 stopped working yesterday. When I try to turn it on, the "LAMP" light on the front flashes for a minute and the red "STANDBY/TEMP" light flashes once. During this time I can see through the back of the TV that the lamp is actually on, but no picture. After a minute or so, the Lamp LED stops flashing and there are no indicator lights on in the power button circle, but I can still the see the lamp is on in the back of the TV and the fans are still on. Shortly after that, the lamp goes out and the fans turn off and the red "STANDBY/TEMP" light on the front comes back on.

Any idea what is causing this?

I'm not sure if the following is relevant, but I'll mention it just in case...

So the other day I finally got around to hooking up the cable to the TV directly. Up to this point I had been using a comcast DVR and had never bothered to hook the coax up to the TV directly, elsewhere in the house I have TVs hooked up direct, and they all work fine. There have been a couple of times I wanted to record two things and watch a third so I thought I could hook up the cable and use the TVs tuner on those rare occasions.

Anyways, I hooked it up and had the TV scan for channels and I was surprised at all the strange channels there were 113-12 and stuff like that so I was flipping around checking them out when the TV seemed to lock up on a channel that looked like a combo of a couple of channels with the color all screwed up. When this happened the TV wouldn't respond to the remote and had to be powered off at the switch to get it working again. After it locked up a couple times, I decided to stop messing around so I flipped back to the DVR and everything seemed fine.

Later on that night, the TV started to act a little strange, every once in a while the picture would cut out and come back after a couple of seconds. When it came back it indicated what the input source was so I was kinda thinking that the cable box was flaking out. I could get the TV to do the same thing I was seeing by unplugging the green component plug from the back so I thought it might be a loose wire that I caused messing around behind the TV.

The next day when I powered on the TV it came up with the same problem, but now the picture would actually freeze, like a DVR pause, and the TV would lock up like before. It locked up once and wouldn't respond to the power button on the TV so I unplugged it (in hindsight probably not a great idea). Ever since then its been dead


Any ideas? I did screw things up hooking it directly to the cable? Did I kill it by unplugging it? Could it be the bulb, or the ballast or something else easy to fix or did I fry it and I need to buy a new TV? I'm probably going to have a repair guy come look at it, but I wanted to have some clue before I had someone out that might try to rip me off.

[acre]

well I got it to turn on by doing the mute 1 8 2 power trick to get into the tech menu, and now I have a picture but the color is all messed up. On an analog signal, its pretty much all green. On a digital signal there is a block pattern in green and purple over the picture.

Is there anything in the menus that I can do to try and reset everything?

[lcaillo]

Not much that I know of to do on your part. Looks like the set will need service. This is a model and a problem that I have not run across yet. Look for someone who does a lot of Samsung service.

[acre]

Well I messed with it more tonight and I noticed that the onscreen menus look fine, but the service menu text looks a little messed up... it seems strange that the picture is messed up but the menus which are overlaid on top of the picture are fine.

Is there some part of the TV that handles all the input signal processing that could be broken, but the menus are fine because they are added downstream before the picture is rendered?

Icaillo, how do I find someone who does a lot of Samsung service? When I called Samsung they said there was only one authorized service center in my area, and when I called it the number was disconnected. This seems strange to me since I live near Houston, TX. I can't imagine that there is only one Samsung authorized service around here.

[lcaillo]

Start calling the local shops and asking.