Category Archives: Photography

Fixing the LG OLED 65″ TV

Hardware

Don’t recycle it!

I wrote about this splendid TV some 7 years ago here.

Recently the sound became intermittent after some 15 minutes of use. I use an external amplifier and speakers and some tests confirmed these are working fine so the fault lies with the TV. Some digging disclosed that loss of sound or vision on warm up is nothing new with LG TVs of a certain age, and it appears the problem is attributable to the use of solder with too low a melting point, causing loss of electrical continuity. That’s either sloppy design or planned obsolescence. Your call.

So I determined to try fixing the issue, which means installing a new motherboard – there are two circuit boards in the TV, the motherboard and the power supply, both passively cooled. There are no fans. In addition to swapping in a new motherboard I decided to enhance the ventilation in the area of both circuit boards. I had noticed that, while waiting for delivery of the new board and leaving the rear panel off, that the sound intermittency problem did not occur, likely due to better ventilation.

Because the TV screen is extremely slim – thinner than an iPhone – it is very fragile, so I moved a cocktail table up to the TV table, covered the former with soft padding and tipped the tv forward onto the cocktail table, allowing access to the rear panel and the stand. Both have to come off and the power supply feed has to be removed – one screw, a small panel and a click fit connector. The stand is retained with four large screws which come off and then the screws holding the back panel can be removed. They are clearly marked with arrow symbols. The top of the rear panel is retained with a bunch of clips – ugh! – so the panel has to be gently popped off, one clip at a time working from one end with fingers inserted between panel and screen. Not a lot of fun. Then all is revealed:



The rear cover removed. The motherboard is at the top, the power supply at the bottom.

Measurements were then made to establish the positions of the two circuit boards and penciled grids were drawn on the rear cover:



Penciled grid in the motherboard area.



The grid in the power supply area. The opening is for the mains cable.

A Forstner bit is used to drill the holes. A regular drill bit will wander and the result will look awful, whereas the pointed tip of the Forstner bit allows precise placement on the grid intersections. Be careful not to drill in locations where there are spigots on the inside of the cover – which is why some holes appear to be ‘missing’.



Holes drilled with protective plastic mesh installed.

The mesh is glued in place using Permatex 80050 Silicone adhesive which the maker’s excellent data sheet states is good to 400F. 24 hours are required for a full cure. The purpose of the mesh is to prevent fingers being poked into the electronics. Do not use metallic mesh. Should it come unglued you’ll risk a short circuit. A check with a tele-thermometer with the cover off and the TV warmed up disclosed a temperature range of 88-108F for the motherboard and the PSU had one component at 143F, so the adhesive will do the trick. Don’t even think of using cyanoacrylate ‘superglue’ – it’s useless. Once the holes are made the penciled grid can be removed with isopropyl alcohol.

The motherboard is retained with 6 screws and the white retaining plate at right is removed and placed in position on the replacement board. There are five connectors, all ‘click’ captive and it took me a while studying these with a magnifying glass to determine how to release the connectors without breaking anything. The two ribbon connectors at top left are real bears and quite fragile, so study carefully before removal.



Old and new motherboards.

After testing the result at high volume for 3 hours – failure formerly occurred after 15 minutes – all is well.

Why DIY? Well you can risk taking this to the repair shop and it is a bear to move and very fragile, whereupon you will be charged $800 for the repair by someone who very much struggles with the English tongue, and then you will have to go through hell again getting the monster screen home. And then if the TV is faulty when you get home, guess whose fault it’s going to be? Or you can do it the American way, recycle the set and buy a new one. The original ran me $2,800 7 years ago, and a similar replacement (with more invasive advertising) is $1,600 today. Still not cheap, reflecting how hard it is to manufacture fault free large OLED panels. And OLED beats anything else into a cocked hat.



Reassembled.

I used TVPartsToday for the motherboard which cost $129 shipped. Their excellent service insists that you provide a picture of the bar code(s) on your existing motherboard before you can place an order as that means an exact match will be shipped. Mine was right the first time. Their site states that they have almost 8,000 parts in stock! By the way, if the TV simply refuses to turn on it’s likely the power supply board that is blown, and these are under $100.

The Nikon D800 in the studio

Nikon bodies, Nikon lenses, Photographs

There is no better bargain.

I have been taking studio pictures with my Novatron strobe outfit for almost three decades now with the cameras ranging from rangefinder Leicas, through Rollieflexes, and Canon and Nikon DSLRs. Autofocus in the DSLRs instantly obsoleted the film equipment which was sold. Maybe the lenses were better, but nailing focus every time beats optical quality in my book.

My Nikon DSLR journey started with a D700, then the D3x, the APS-C D2x, and finally the D800. The latter was introduced by Nikon in 2012 for $3,000 and I paid just $525 a few months ago for mine with 16k clicks. Clicks are not that important for a body designed to deliver 200,000 of them, but a USA legal import is. Nikon USA will refuse to service grey market imports. Check the serial number and look for the ‘Nikon USA’ sticker inside the battery compartment.



The all important sticker.

Suffice it to say that, with the introduction of mirrorless bodies and new lenses to fit, Nikon has comprehensively trashed the used value of every DSLR they ever made and most of the lenses which fit it.

Yes, the D750 and D780 and D810 and D850 have better low light sensors but that is of no use in the studio environment. With powerful strobes I’m mostly using ISO 200 or less.

Two things stand out in my D800 experience in the studio. Even in the low ambient light that I use with weak modeling lamps in the strobes, focus is nailed every time and as for absence of sensor noise it is simply extraordinary. Definition is like nothing I’ve ever seen and while I am strictly an SOOC guy, knowing that I can crop when needed is comforting.

Maybe a Phase One or a digital Hasselblad with a large medium format sensor will render more detail for the mega buck cost of entry, but as I have no interest in making billboard-sized enlargements, call me a happy camper. And keeping the additional $12,000 in my pocketbook is a benefit not lost on me.

Do I have a complaint? Of course. Just take a look what this little outfit weighs with the 28-300mm AFS zoom and loaded battery grip:



A waistline comparable with that of most Americans.
Can you spell ‘obese’?

I extolled the D800’s many virtues, weight aside, here, but as ever pictures speak louder than words. Here is Dutch, a gorgeous Hungarian Vizsla, in a recent studio session, SOOC naturally:



A beautiful hunting dog, descended from Hungarian royalty.


Sharp enough for you?

One final advantage. Even my ancient, non-subscription Lightroom v 6.4 from 2015, bought and paid for just once, happily processes D800 RAW files. Try that with your latest and greatest Nikon body, or pay the nasty people at Adobe a monthly fee of $20 in perpetuity – and good luck getting off that treadmill. It’s not for nothing that the US DoJ just sued them for shady subscription practices.

The vintage Black & Decker electric can opener

Cooking

They don’t make ’em like they used to.

I wrote about an excellent and inexpensive manual can opener here. That design works well but increasing pain from stressed wrists suggested I look for a powered alternative.

I owned one of these years ago, but while functional it is quite specially ugly:



The current model

As the image discloses it is also ridiculously overpriced.

So I hunted around and found a beautiful, curvaceous vintage B&D design on eBay.



The vintage EC85 model

I had to craft four 2” stand-off metal ferrules to drop the opener sufficiently below the deep valance at the front of the cupboard base, to permit proper access to controls. Quality workshop time. These ferrules are invisible. The provided retaining screws are very long to permit proper height positioning, and the threads engage immediately. A well thought out design.



The invisible ferrules

Note how the cutter assembly ugliness is largely invisible – compare with the current model. B&D originally provided up to 5 sets of stand-offs (‘spiders’), but my opener came with only one (just visible in the first image) – hence the ferrules, which are actually more robust than the original design. The spider doubles as an alignment aide for the four 1/4″ through holes which are required for the pass-through retaining screws. The major complaint with these is yellowing of the plastic body and I lucked out with a decent looking one.

So if you can find one which is not yellowed and includes the spiders (make sure the screw washers are included), your outlay will not exceed $50 and you will not shudder every time you look at it. Of course, it’s only 40 years old, so it works perfectly. A bottle opener (lower left) and knife sharpener (right) are included. And yes, a magnet grabs and holds the cut off lid.

Enjoy – and no more wrist pain. And I would avoid free standing designs – there are better uses for your kitchen counter space and ‘free standing’ is a flawed design concept when you are struggling with that extra large can.

Kodachrome – the only excuse to use film

Bio, Film, Photographs

Gone, but not forgotten.

The Big Yellow God. Thus was Kodak known in the 1970s because you mailed your exposed Kodachrome slide film in a yellow mailer to Rochester, NY and time and the USPS permitting, you would get your slides back, beautifully mounted in 2″x2″ cardboard, in a yellow box, in a couple of weeks.


The Ektachrome outlier was their 160ASA/ISO speed demon!

In 1970 Kodak lost a trust busting suit which allowed only the BYG to process Kodachrome and the floodgates opened to independent processing shops who could afford the costly gear and crack the 17-step process, which included a couple of re-exposure steps to effect reversal of the image. Consonant with that old economic adage that “All control drives up price” prices crashed and Kodachrome became the most popular film on the planet. That explains the above slides lacking the Kodak imprimatur on the cardboard mount. They were processed by indie shops which had a faster turnaround.


The Kodachrome process.

While my color snapping had seen but one roll of Kodachrome exposed in Paris along with one of grain crazy Ansco/GAF’s 500, I no longer had a darkroom after taking my last TriX monochrome image and, quite frankly, I was bored to death with black and white. So why not the best? I loaded up my Leica with Kodachrome 64 (I considered the 25 ASA alternative too slow) and had at it. This was in November, 1977.


My first color image in the US. November, 1977, Anchorage, AK.


Indie Kodak processing lab, Anchorage.


Harsh and high contrast.


Kodachrome yellows and reds were to die for.


On the Natchez, Mississippi River, New Orleans.


Brennan’s, New Orleans.


Bourbon Street, New Orleans.


New Orleans.


Bergdorf’s, NYC.


NYC.

Kodachrome was a very contrasty film with unique rendering of yellows and reds. It was not especially fine grained, as these ultra-high resolution scans from my Nikon D800 disclose. At ISO 100 on the D800’s monster 36mp sensor there is zero digital ‘grain’. You only see what was stored on the film itself. No matter. They print just fine.

Leica M3 and Leicaflex SL, 50mm Summicron, Kodachrome 64, ‘scanned’ on the Nikon D800.

Film was awful. It still is.

Film, Photography

Don’t waste your time on obsolete technologies.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.


All in one piece.

My film ‘scanning’ project is almost complete. You can see a video of the technique here.

Suffice it to say that this is the only efficient, high quality way of scanning a large number of film negatives or slides.

Starting on February 4, some 59 days ago, I have scanned over 164 rolls of 36 exposure monochrome film, totaling over 5,900 exposures. 2,198 or 37% of those were ‘keepers’, a high rate in an age of free imaging with vast, low cost digital storage technologies, where a 3% success rate is considered high. I spent 1-2 hours daily doing this for a total time sink of some 100 hours. That included printing the best images for my large format print albums.

To have attempted this project using either a dedicated film scanner (reasonable definition, slow) or flat bed scanner (poor definition, molasses slow) would have taken for ever and it’s simply not a good use of time. Further, the modest investment in a macro lens and illuminated film strip attachment for this project, both easily resold, is lower than any of the alternatives. And the quality of the ‘scans’ is drop dead gorgeous, more definition retrieved from 50 year old negatives than I could have possibly dreamed of.


Yellowed glassines but pristine film inside

What is good about film? Not much. All mine were developed in a Paterson System 4 developing tank, available still and little changed. What appears to be missing is the handy clip-in hose which was attached to a tap and pumped water through the reel into the bottom of the tank, displacing fixer residue and assuring permanence. You did this for 30 minutes, wasting shocking quantities of water. Why 30 minutes? Because no one new any better and, if you wanted your originals to survive, more was better than less. Maybe 5 minutes would have sufficed. We will never know.

As for scan quality, the Nikon D800 I used delivered in spades. I started using 14-bit uncompressed RAW which delivered a 75mp file. Later I switched to 12-bit lossless compressed and the quality was indistinguishable, the file size halving to 36mp. Key to the efficiency of this process was the Negative Lab Pro Lightroom plugin which automated the reversal of negative image to positive. I would do this once on the first negative frame then save the whole process as a Preset. That Preset was then set up in the LR Tethered capture dialog box, with the D800 connected by a USB cable to LR. ‘Scan’ the image and, Hey Presto!, 5 seconds later the properly reversed positive image appears in LR. LR does not allow crop settings to be saved in the Preset, but other than that the process is about as automated as it gets. I would ‘scan’ two films – 72 exposures – daily and the scanning part would take maybe 5 seconds an image.

Don’t even think of using some sort of copying attachment where the camera and film stage are physically separated. And forget about futzing with glass plates in a futile effort to keep the film as flat as possible. You will simply collect more dust and possibly Newton rings in the process. Anti-Newton ring glass? The quickest way to destroy the definition of your scanned image. I found that stopping down the 60mm Micro-Nikkor macro lens to f/13 provided adequate depth of field for edge-to-edge sharply defined grain and ISO100 means that there is no digital ‘grain’. Deny these realities and you will waste immense amounts of time framing and focusing, and many of your efforts will be duds. The hardware I used unifies the camera, the film stage/film strip holder and the included LED light source. Alignment issues are a thing of the past and auto exposure and auto focus are the bees’ knees. Camera shake? Impossible. Camera and film are one.

Which brings us to one of the worst aspects of analog film. Dust and dirt. It’s one thing to speed the scanning process to deliver a high quality image. It’s quite another to remove all the dust and hairs which bedevil the medium. Time varied but particularly dirty originals might take a minute to retouch using LR’s excellent tools for this purpose. Ugh!

Follow the above instructions and I can guarantee that really large prints from your ‘scans’ will be the order of the day, provided your originals are of good quality. Mine are.

Anyway, this whole process made me revisit some of the horrors of film. Now it’s not like there was an alternative in 1974 as no one had thought up digital imaging until the brilliant engineer Steve Sasson at Kodak came up with a prototype a year later. Kodak bungled development of the technology (“There will never be a time when film will be obsolete” said one of the brain’s trust board directors), went bankrupt in the process and a quarter century later Canon and Nikon marketed really good ‘prosumer grade’ full frame DSLRs which were almost affordable at $3,000 for the body. The Canon 5D and Nikon D700. Film died that day. These 12mp bodies remain superb, bargain priced performers to this day.

But film was genuinely awful as a recording and storage medium.

Metadata? Nope. Good luck finding that special image.

Robust, scratch and dirt free permanent image retention? Nope.

Oh! but the superior tonal range! Well, maybe cut back on the funny cigarettes.

And whatever you do, to deliver an image to the world, whether printed or on a display screen, you have to get film digitized in any case. So much for ‘analog workflow’. Use of film in today’s world is akin to three bald men arguing over a comb. An exercise in futility.

Tonal range? This is like vinyl LP nuts insisting that the quality of vinyl sound beats everything else. I challenge you to distinguish my D800 digital originals from the film version. Well, yes, you probably will. Just as the LP is distinguishable by its click, pops, scratches and poor signal-to-noise ratio, so is film distinguishable by its awful definition, low sensitivity, poor dynamic range and superabundance of dirt and scratches. It’s hard to think of a more fragile storage medium. If you are a crank who places more value on the backroom processes of developing and scanning film than on the taking of photographs, film is just the ticket.

For everyone else, film is awful. And it always was.


My last monochrome film image.
She is rushing to pick up a digital camera.

OK, Mr. Opinionated Weisenheimer, you say. So you used film for decades and maybe you know what you are speaking of, but I still want to use film. Then I suggest you cannot do better than the Nikon F100. It has auto exposure, auto focus, takes all Nikon Ai lenses and later and has auto film advance. It’s made to a high standard and can be found easily for $150 or less. This body gives you access to a large range of bargain priced Nikon lenses, MF or AF and, when you come to your senses and migrate or return to digital, those lenses will work seamlessly along with your newly found sanity.