TV on the way out?

My TV in my bedroom, which has been in the family for over 10 years, is starting to show signs of age... The speakers on the set stopped working about a month or two ago, so now the only way I can get sound is through the wire I have coming from the headphone socket into my amp.

And also, today, I've noticed that the set has started making a popping noise and the screen briefly goes blank... so it looks like its finally on the way out.

What's the average life expectancy of a TV, and do you think it would be cheaper to get it fixed, or put it out of its misery and get a new set?

Get a new set, my Bedroom TV broke in 1998 so we got that fixed, at Currys of course and ISTR it was about £50+, but prices have come well down, so I would suggest getting a new one, you can get them for about £50. It also depends how often you watch it too, if you've watched it alot over the 10 years, then it's probably dying naturally.

I used to have a Sony Televideo in my room, that I bought in 1999 for £250 from a Dixons Clearance thing and last year the VCR within the machine started to play up whenever it rewound, so I got a cheap VCR from Asda and then got a new 15" Ferguson Flat Screen (Not Plasma, just a flat screen) from Currys for £89.99 for my birthday, it cuts some of the top and bottom of the screen off, but it does the job.

The spare telly I've got is an "FST" type made around about the time "FastText" (sp) was still a relatively new technology.
Even though we got it as a 2nd User item in 1993, I'm guessing it was manufactured something like about 20 years ago.

Mind you, the colour guns inside the box did go a bit funny about two years ago. The screen looked as though there'd
been an extra strong magnet superglued to the side of the box! I had to tilt the whole thing at a roughly 45* angle to
get the colours to look right, and could only watch it in the spare bedroom whilst lying on my left side. I must've
lost count the number of mornings I awoke with a temporarily paralysed left arm because of that fault.

I eventually got fed up of this situation, and one evening, gave the box a good firm thump on the right side of the unit.
Surprisingly, this actually solved the problem, and the TV has displayed pictures in the correct colours ever since!

The TV in question is now stood in the correct position, about a metre or so to my left as I type this.

Isn't the life expectancy of a plasma screen around 10 years ?

Anyways i've got a 1984 Sony Trinitron monitor as my main TV and it's worked fantasticly since the day it came from the box. Still works brilliantly now, i use it everyday. You can't beat good old fashioned tubes!

...and I thought this was going to be a deep analytical discussion on the future of television

In my bedroom, I have an old 1980s Hitatchi colour TV and there's been no problems with it since we got it. It only has one Scart though.

Here's a lesson for everyone in life... had my old portable TV since about 1992. Worked fine. Purchased an additional new TV for the sake of it a couple of months ago and a couple of nights ago it clicked, flashed and seems to have died.

I had an old Hitachi portable (circa 1992) and since day one it never stop making a whistling sound. The only way to cure it was to bang the set or turn it off and on numerous times.

I'm on my 3rd TV set in my bedroom, since 1996. First one just died on me one day. Second one might have been my fault as I knocked it off its stand once, though it was repaired by Currys, so should have been as good as new when they had fixed it, but that died about a year after.

Got an old Hitachi 17" colour one down in the kitchen though and that's been working fine since 1977- I ask myself could it go on indefinitely, with it having.lasted this long! - Incidentally, it's one of those ITV1 & ITV2 buttoned types, made at the time when the plans for a 4th channel were still young.

Can't beat old technology!

In my experience, the modern ones tend to die suddenly - they bang, click or flash, or slip away in the night. The ancient ones tend to drag the process along a bit. The picture will quiver or distort, the sound will gently fizzle out, or the buttons will, one by one, decide to go into retirement. I think the ancient televisions are far more courteous in their death process, allowing you enough time to research a newer replacement that will inevitably die months afterwards.

I don't know why I didn't mention this in my earlier post, but in the main bedroom, we have a telly that's even older than
the other one. It's a D:E:R branded colour TV with mono sound, and is probably about 25 (or more) years old by now!

It doesn't have any scart sockets on it, just one solitary RF socket on the back, just below 8 (rather fiddly) tuning dials
representing each of the 8 square channel buttons situated on the front of the box, just above the speaker, and below
the electronic channel number indicator. The screen is definitely not of the "FST" variety, as you might imagine, and
there's no built-in teletext decoder. With it having a D:E:R logo below the speaker, it's most likely to have originally
been a rented TV. There's no knowing how many households it's been in, before settling into my humble abode.

Even though it's a much older set, it's speaker is about 3 times bigger, so it sounds better than the other one.

What a beautifully graceful way of personifying the lack of love in today's manufacturing processes...