Panasonic blinking red lights. You know what it means. We see the various blogs on the internet of DIYer's explaining what the number of blinking lights mean and have even gone so far as compiling their own personal step-by-step guides and actual tech manuals straight from the manufacturer's service repair centers in PDF format that explains all of this! This isn't new news to us. Ever since the internet became mainstream, any information that you can possible want to look for is easily found on the World Wide Web. But we're not here to tell you about whether piracy is unethical or how information on any one thing is easily accessible these days. No. 

What we'd like to talk about today is Panasonic's unique system to diagnose "problematic boards" in their TV's. It's actually a very neat system. Basically, it goes something like this: When a board goes bad or starts failing, the TV wouldn't even turn on when you press the power button. However, it'll spit out a series of flashing lights on the little LED that tells you whether the TV is turned on, is on standby, is on sleep mode, etc. And what Panasonic has done is take that LED flashing mechanism and throw out a series of flashing lights that tell you which one of its boards are "bad" or has failed. Now, we're not going to go into the nitty gritty of each TV model and what their flashing lights mean but let's just say, for illustration purposes, that you found the "tech manual" for your particular TV models series on the internet that says that the Main Board is three blinks, the Power Supply is five blinks, the Logic Board is seven blinks, and so on and so forth for every board that's in a typical Panasonic Plasma TV. (Neat Fact: Panasonic has discontinued making their line of Plasma TV's since 2013 and have refocused their efforts on making LED's, OLED's, and other flat panel technologies instead). And let's just say that your TV started exhibiting the five blinks, which, in this case, would point to the Power Supply. You go and buy the Power Supply from some online retailer on the internet, put it in, and try to turn it on but it won't turn on. Instead, it spits out the same five blinks, which, again, points to the Power Supply. Now, logic tells you that "Hey, this Power Supply that I just bought from XYZ company is bad!"

Here's the problem with that. In a perfect world, those five blinks would guarantee that the Power Supply is the problematic board. But what they (the TV manufacturers) don't tell you is that this isn't a perfect world and that "tech manual" that you found on the internet, which may very well be the actual service manual that they use to train their in-house technicians serves as a starting point, rather than the "end all, be all" of what's wrong with your TV. "But wait a minute," you might say. "The tech manual was made by Panasonic and they explain it in pretty black and white terms. IF this TV gives five blinks, THEN the problem is this board. IF the TV gives seven blinks, THEN the problem is that board." And you'd be right. The manual does, in fact, say that. But that's not the nature of electronics. Your TV may require 120V, let's just say, for it to turn on and operate but that does not mean that it will suck in exactly 120V from your AC outlet to power your TV and keep it for as long as you want. In engineering school, they make it seem like it's an exact science but in practice, it's not. In practice, 'electrical current' (also known as  'electricity') is actually variable, meaning that it's in constant change. That means that the voltages vary between a range (usually anywhere between 0 to infinity). You can think of it like a water faucet. If there was no valve to open and close the faucet, the full force of water would simply come gushing out of that faucet mouth without restraint. Electrical current operates in much the same way. The moment you press the power button, it acts like the equivalent of 'opening' a water faucet. 

Having said that, you might be wondering now, "Well, if that's true, how is electrical current regulated?" The answer is quite simply that all of the capacitors, transistors, condensers, diodes, and every other little knick knacks that you see on a typical circuit board is used to regulate all that electrical current. So, if a board was not getting the right amount of electrical current, say, not enough power, then the TV won't turn on and the TV will spit out the blinking codes. On the other hand, if it was getting too much power, one or more components will "blow out," the TV might continue working for a little bit further before finally shutting down and spitting out the same set of blinking codes. Fairly straightforward so far, right?

Now, you might be thinking "Ok, buddy. I get all that. So why do I need to know all this?" The reason why you need to know this is that if there was a failure in any one of these individual components on said bad board or one or more is about fail but still works intermittently on a different board, the TV will still tell you the same blinking sequence, five blinks, let's just say, which points to the former board that is "bad" but it doesn't tell that there may be another board that is bad along with the former board. It doesn't tell you the 'source' of the problem. In other words, it doesn't tell you where exactly the "lack of electrical current" or "too much electrical current" is coming from or going to. Panasonic's blinking code sequence is designed to assume that all other circuit boards are working fine (and more importantly, 'within spec') and that the only problematic board is the board in which the blinking sequence indicates. With that said, fortunately in most instances (roughly 95% of all TV's sold; give or take 5%), only one board will go bad at any given time. But every so while (the other 5%), two or more boards will go bad at the same time and this is essentially the limitations of Panasonic's blinking code sequence. It will still only tell you that one of those boards is bad. So even after "replacing the problematic board" and still receiving the same blinking code sequence, it doesn't necessarily mean that the board that you bought is bad. It just means that there is more than one board in your TV that's bad and trying to figure out which of the boards is the cause or merely "the after effect" of the cause can be very time-consuming and a real hassle to narrow down. And that's not even including trying to find that correct board on the World Wide Web at the price that you can afford.

This is the reason why TV repair centers, whether authorized service centers by the manufacturers or independent service centers tend to charge a high price premium to fix TV's. The cost of correctly diagnosing the problem, the cost of spending the time to find the correct board(s), and the cost of dealing with parts suppliers all factor into the price that repair centers charge customers. So whether you plan on taking a gamble and fixing your own TV or taking your TV to a reputable TV service center--you are getting what you paid for.