Don’t ignore these distress signals from a dying TV ‣ Diverse Daily

Sometimes, the death of a smart TV is a sudden thing. If it turns on at all, there may be conspicuous dead pixels, garish lines from one end to the other, or broken backlights that render part of the screen dim or completely dark. While modern LCD and OLED TVs can last over a decade if they’re treated properly, it’s impossible to completely dodge the risk of accidents or random defects.

In other instances, the decline is slow. The signs are so subtle that you might not notice for days, weeks, or months. Indeed you might initially take them as quirks you have to live with — right up until you find yourself scrambling for a replacement on movie night. It’s better to have advance warning, so you can at least start putting some money aside.

The most common TV symptoms you have to watch out for

A careful eye will pay off

A Samsung QN900D 8K TV with Red Dead Redemption 2.

The exact signs to watch out for will depend on the panel type you’re dealing with. On LCDs, including variants like QLED and mini-LED, the main threat is backlight failure. You may, for instance, see one or more lighting zones briefly dim before returning to regular brightness levels. That suggests that the diodes or associated circuits are having problems, most likely because of heat-related degradation. It does take quite a lot of power to illuminate a non-OLED display.

Both LCDs and OLEDs can develop a worsening color tint. In the case of LCDs, this may be a flaw with the coatings used to ensure true white light. As for OLEDs, the cause is probably the “O” in the acronym: the organic electroluminescent layer. Different colors degrade at different rates. No matter what you do, your OLED will inevitably start skewing towards a particular color. You can try to compensate by adjusting your TV’s picture settings, but that’s a stopgap solution at best. The good news is that this effect is unlikely to be noticeable for many years.

Focusing on OLED for a moment, tint is just one head in the tech’s hydra: burn-in. If static images are left onscreen for hours at a time, patches can degrade unevenly, resulting in distracting “ghost” patterns. TV makers do use a variety of features to mitigate this, such as pixel shifting and logo brightness adjustment, but the risk isn’t nil. It’s a bad idea to buy an OLED if you want to leave it on a news channel all day, or love marathon gaming sessions.

On top of that, the brightness of an OLED will always shrink in the long term. Automatic and manual compensation does slow this down, and it may not be a serious concern for a long while. Most OLEDs aren’t bright in the first place, however, so you could find yourself wanting to upgrade just to avoid closing the curtains every time you watch YouTube.

With all TVs, problems can affect components you may never have thought of. Panel layers sometimes warp, for example, mostly if LED backlighting is left too high for too long, creating thermal stress. You’ll know that’s going on if you see hazy patches on your TV, or else uneven light bleed from around the edges. Meanwhile, ribbon cables and chip-on-film drivers can lose their bonding, triggering temporary vertical or horizontal lines. It’s total failure of those components that produces the permanent lines I mentioned in my intro.

If your TV is taking a long time to boot or recognize inputs, it could be that your motherboard and/or power supply are on their last legs. A certain amount of voltage is required for peak performance, so naturally, anything interfering with that will slow you down. There could be other culprits, mind you — if you’ve got a 2016 TV trying to run 2026 software, it could just be that it can’t keep up with modern graphics or UI features. If that’s the case, you might not need anything more than an add-on media streamer to get back in action.

Unfortunately, most of these faults can’t be repaired, at least not in a cost-effective way. Miniaturization has made it harder and harder to swap things out, and the parts that can be swapped are often so expensive that after labor costs, a replacement TV is probably the better deal.