Hi I have an hitachi 26" TV with combined DVD and recently the DVD has started playing in black and white any ideas what this May be thanks

'Possibly' EEPROM corruption, caused by poor quality capacitors in the PSU, a common problem with cheap Vestel sets.

On some TVs it is possible to set different picture options for each source being viewed. So it might be that when the DVD is selected the colour control has been turned down to black and white. So the picture settings menu would be the first thing to check.

If they all seem OK then one option might be to do a Factory Reset on the TV. This will restore it to out of the box condition which means you will have to retune Freeview all over again and any settings you have changed will be reset to their defaults. But if it is caused by some configuration oddity this may clear it.

If that fails then it could be hardware fault. Which is why I will never give house room to an all in one device. In this instance to fix the DVD player you lose the TV as well. Similarly if the DVD is beyond economic repair you have to replace the TV as well. With separate devices you only fix/replace the faulty bit and can continue using the working bit in the meantime.

Provided the TV has adequate connectivity then with a faulty DVD player there is nothing to stop someone using an external DVD player the same as if the TV never had one in the first place so not that great a disadvantage. Having said that I'd always buy separates and don't actually care what tuner is in the TV either.

By any chance, have the settings changed to some thing like NTSC or SECAM playback. Might be worth checking.

thank you for your replies I will look at picture settings

It shouldn't make the slightest bit of difference, as it doesn't apply to a DVD player (particularly an internal one) as it's connected via RGB (so no colour encoding involved).

Hi iv'e checked settings and all seems ok,but i have noticed that also on dtv/usb it's also black and white. i normally use a separate free view recorder box and this works in colour no problems.

That's because it connects as RGB, so there's no colour signal to decode, hence it can't go B&W.

Lack of colour is relatively common on the cheap gear. presumably due to EEPROM corruption (as I mentioned earlier), and probably caused by duff capacitors in the set.