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Not my cup of tea. Everytime I run a "free pick-up of non-working TV's" ad in the paper, I am flooded with calls from people wanting to give me these things. If I ever run such an ad, there will be a line that says "no projection style big screen TV's".
About 2-3 years ago, an older lady asked me to come to her home to fix her old RCA PTK169 projection set. So, I pulled out the guts, brought them home, replaced the usual bad power supply/HOT components that fail in these sets, and took it back home. About six months later, it died again. The HOT was shorted, again; and, I could find no reason for it. A new HOT got the set back going and I told the lady that if it died again, she would be better off to junk it. Not long after that, the owner passed away and I think I saw her TV at the Salvation Army store.
Before that, I gave someone $10 for a monster RCA PTK179 projection TV. It needed a new HV splitter, a screen/focus control assembly, and the usual solder job on the tuner. I actually sold that set for good money; but, the splitter failed again, about a year later, and I had the set right back in my way. After fixing the set, it took the people longer than I would have liked for them to come get it. Then, about six months after that, they bought a regular CRT TV from me and told me that the big screen had died again. I told them that I no longer accepted those types of TV's for repair.
I did fix a more modern plastic cased projection set for a guy (replaced the convergence IC's); but, that one didn't weigh 900 lbs. and take 5 people to move.
As far as I'm concerned; they take up too much room, they are too hard to handle, and then there's the hassle of the thing possibly coming back to bite me in the butt. And, this is one area where I would favor a lightweight LCD TV over an older projection set. If I wanted a large screen, I'd take an LCD TV anyday over a monster projection set with a muddy picture. And, I've never seen a projection TV that produced a picture that I thought was great.
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