I just spent 4 hours doing TV repair on my HDTV. I bought it close to 4 years ago, and spent around $1800 on it. Warranties don't appeal to me in the first place and throwing it away didn't seem like a good option. So, I took it apart and found that one of the capacitors had a piece of solder that was touching a grounded piece of the frame. It was creating a few sparks, but mainly removed all of the soldering around it. It eventually lost enough to cause the TV not to power on. All I had to do was spend the time to take things apart to get to the very inside and re-solder the part onto the PCB board again. It wasn't too hard, but I don't know any of my friends or family that would do that. They would probably want me to fix it.
But I'm curious what a normal person would do in this situation? Would you do the same thing? Would you try to find someone else to repair it? Do you go shopping for a replacement? Is there someplace to take it or send it back to the manufacturer? Would you sell it on eBay?