While watching TV a few days ago we noticed that in the corners and parts of the middle of the screen were messed up. It was like watching one of those old 3D movies, you know, the ones you needed to wear those silly red and green glasses. The weird part was that some of the screen was perfectly normal. After a few stabs using the “Autofocus” button resulted in far less than stellar repair. I decided it was time to hit the internet in search of a diagnosis.

After much digging and reading I gathered what I was experiencing was a convergence issue, most likely related to some chips ( STK392-560 ) going bad on the board. Seems that many people were experiencing the same issues with their Sony projection TV’s. Now mine was an older KP-51HW40 and wasn’t really mentioned much. But after making a few calls to local shops, it seemed the going rate to get it fixed was between $400-500. A little steep for a repair, when a new 50″ 720p replacement was around $800, not to mention it would have been a step up from the 1080i, but that’s a different article.

Everyone did seem to say that it wasn’t that difficult to replace the chips, BUT they did keep mentioning that you needed to get good original chips and not some cheap rip offs that were all over the internet. So armed with a few good chips, I ventured into the guts of my TV. First off let me say that my TV is built into an entertainment center. And when I say built in, I mean it’s a huge production to get it into a spot where I can even work on it, let alone rip it apart. None the less, after locating the chips, the job seemed fairly straight forward. Desolder the old chips, replace with the new ones ensuring they had heat sink paste between them and the heatsinks, and then re-solder the chips. I think the whole repair took me less time than it did to get the TV out and apart. I will say that being the careful type, I did write down in my notebook exactly where every screw and cable connection came from.

After all was said and done, I moved the TV back and pressed the on button to see if we had life. IT WAS A SUCCESS!!! So I did what all great home repair dads do…I sat down and watch two hours of TV!