A few weeks ago my Samsung 46″ LCD TV starting acting up. It’s just over two years old (Model Number LN-T4665F), but that’s long enough to be out of the warranty period. Every once in a while purple dots would cover the picture, but if you turned the TV off and then back on, the dots would go away.

Right around the same time the TV had another issue where it would power on a couple times before the picture would actually appear on the screen. The Samsung plays a start up sound when you first press power on your remote. Normally the picture appears shortly after the start up sound, but my TV would play the sound two or three times before the picture would appear.

A Google search turned up a number of people with the same symptoms. AVS Forum has a huge thread on this series of Samsung LCD’s, and includes a bunch of advice on how to fix the problem. Long story short, you need to replace some bad capacitors on the power supply board.

Step one is opening up the TV. There are a bunch of screws to remove on the back, don’t forget the big wall mount bolts. Here’s a picture with the back cover removed.

And here is a close up of the bad capacitors.

I replaced three of these (total cost was < $6 at Fry’s). The bad ones are the medium sized black capacitors with a bulge on top. I put everything back together and the TV is working great!

UPDATE: Several readers have been able to get Samsung to fix this issue even if your set is out of warranty. Read the comments below for more information.