About a year ago I purchased a 27" flat screen Philips CRT TV. The model number was 27PT6441/37. It really wasn't a very good TV. It sounded like it was about to blow up every time I turned it on, and straight edges in the picture always looked curved. But it was cheap for a 27" flat screen, so I ignored the small problems.

About 10 months later, it stopped working. Carrie was apparently watching it and it just shut off. We couldn't get it to turn back on. I looked up the warranty and it was only 2 months or so for parts and labor. It still had a year for parts, but I couldn't find my receipt so I just opted to go buy a new TV.

Since then I've had the broken Philips TV sitting in a room just taking up space. Yesterday I got the urge to open the sucker up and take a peak inside. It took a lot of work to get it open cause there were about 8 screws that required one of those stupid hex or star-shaped ends. I don't have a screwdriver with that end so I had to use one of those little L-shaped tools on all 8 of the screws.

Once I finally got all the screws undone and took off the back, I immediately saw a blown fuse right next to where the power connects to the main board. I took out the fuse and read the text 250V and T4E on it. I assumed that meant 250 volts, but I wasn't sure if that was enough info so I called my dad. He informed me that I need to know the amps the fuse was rated for, and also whether it was fast blow or slow blow.

To get the information I needed, I turned to the internet. I did a search for philips 27PT6441 fuse. And found this blog posting. Turns out there is a large number of people with this same exact problem. The fuse is a 4 amp 250 volt slow blow.

I jumped in my car and headed off for Radio Shack. We have two Radio Shacks in our town. Neither of them had the 4 amp 250 volt slow blow fuse, so I ended up just getting a 5 amp one. Did I mention how little I know about this stuff? But anyway, I was willing to take the risk since I had already considered the TV to be broken garbage, so I could care less if I broke it even more.

I got home and carefully installed one of the new fuses. I was kinda scared that I'd touch the wrong thing and get a fatal shock from the capacitor. Luckily for me, that never happened. Once it was installed I plugged the TV in and instantly heard a charging-up sort of sound from the TV. I then hit the power button and sure enough the TV turned on as if there was never a problem. I put the case back on the TV and spent another half hour putting those stupid screws back in.

The TV is now working fine and I put it on our basement. I'll probably try to find the proper 4 amp fuse for the TV just to be on the safe side. Since the old fuse blows out, I know that at some point power will come to the TV that exceeds 4 amps, probably don't want to let that get through the fuse and screw up other more expensive things.

The really interesting part of this whole story is how many other people have had this problem. If you took a link to the blog posting I linked to, you can read all the stories of the people who were in the exact same situation. In fact, it's not just on that website. Check out these Amazon customer reviews of the TV. If you read the comments you'll notice that everyone who calls Philips gets a total run-around. Some people have stories where they had to keep calling Philips for like a month to get them to pay for it to be fixed. Some are even considering a class-action lawsuit.

Anyway, the point of my story is simple. NEVER BUY A PHILIPS PRODUCT. I understand products are going to have glitches, but it is totally unacceptable that people call Philips and are consistently told that there are no known problems with the TV. Philips surely knows this is a wide-spread problem. I've never seen such consistent negative problems for a product before. So stay away from Philips, seriously. Crap company.