KONKA tv sets. How ugly are they?

[Circlotron]

About 4 or 5 years ago I bought a Chinese-made Konka 68cm PAL tv set. At the time it was relatively cheap AUD$800. It has given no trouble at all. What I want to know is what are they like inside? From the picture quality you can see that some shortcuts have been taken, e.g. the picture size varies a little with changes in brightness because of poor crt eht regulation but overall I am satisfied I got what I paid for. Someone once told me that they use Panasonic internals but I have my doubts. Are they "outwardly indeed appearing whitewashed but inside full of dead means bones" or somewhat better?

[mrfeedback]

Graham, from what I have seen, (only a few), Konka sets are quite high quality.
The ones I have seen run a Panasonic tube, Panasonic chipset, and good layout, good soldering, and good passives quality.
Overall, I would say that they are reasonably good - certainly better than Akai or Teac quality.

Now that your set is getting to 5 years, if it were my set, I would completely disconnect the board and remove it and lay it on the bench.
Common failure modes are smps primary side capacitors drying out and causing either smps regulator chip failure, or B+ rail to increase and causing secondary side downstream failures, and dry joints in high power stages.

My normal ctv repair method is to replace smps primary side and feedback associated caps, replace vertical amplifier associated caps, and blanket resolder the smps and line output stages, and joints on any high power (hot running) devices, and then solvent clean (isopropyl) your reworking.
All of my sets have had this treatment and have run perfectly reliably long term, as have my customers' sets.

Perhaps while you are at it you should investigate why the B+ regulation is poor - maybe it as simple as increasing a few of the larger cap values.

Unfortunately, about the only good way to get really good regulation is to get a Sony - all my Sony image sizes are rock solid.

Eric.