Philips 28PW6005 - vertical line on left side of the screen?

[pupuzuken]

Bought a used 28" Widescreen Philips TV and there's a sort of fuzzy vertical line about 1-1.5 inch wide on the furthest left side of the screen when in any mode except for 4:3.

After fooling around with it I've come to the conclusion that the TV shifts the screen to the left a bit (very obvious in the 4:3 mode; no line here but the image isn't centered) and the little part that gets outside it somehow decided to display in a fuzzy distorted line on the left side. This thing is visible even with the b&w snow crash image.

Now, my PlayStation 2 somehow manages to bypass this when playing games, but not when playing DVD movies. In Widescreen zoom mode you can still see that the image is aligned a bit to the left (there's a small black bar on the right side of the screen), but there's no distorded line or anything.

Any tips on working through this? I found that if you just zoom in on the 4:3 image with the up and down arrows you don't get this problem when you've zoomed in enough to cover the whole screen, so one solution would be to find a DVD player that with screen alignment options, push that to the right a bit and choose settings like if I had a 4:3 TV, and then just zoom in on that image with the Philips. This should work but I'm not sure about it, and I'll also get worse quality than playing in anamorphic widescreen. And since the PS2 somehow bypasses it on games there should be another way.

Anyone have any ideas or tips? Could this be magnetic disturbance or something like that? Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[Guest]

Don't buy used tv's?

[pupuzuken]

Well yeah >_>. Though I won't have any money for a reasonably good new one until maybe christmas (student) so I didn't have much choice.

[torbjorn]

This type of fuzzy line at the extreme left of the picture was a common problem formerly, it is often called a "wool wire". It is caused by a switching transient occuring in the transition from horizontal flyback to the forward sweep. Check out if there are any diodes in the horizontal output area that have R-C snubber networks connected in parallel, and then check that the components of the snubber networks are in order.
If the tv's SMPS is running synchronously to the horizontal deflection, then you should also check similar circuitry there.

If there are signs of previous repairs in those areas, make sure that all diodes are of the correct type. The wool wire problem is common if a "slow" diode like 1N4007 or 1N5408 is used as replacement for a "fast recovery" or "soft recovery" type. Also, make sure that any ferrite beads on the diode connections are fitted in the correct place. When comparing diode data, please download the manufacturer's data sheets and compare them rather than looking at short form data in cross reference books.

In the early 70's , some badly designed tv's from smaller manufacturers suffered more or less from the wool wire problem even when everything was in order.