> With new monitors going for under $200, the costs of any significant repair are no longer justifiable unless there is something unique about your monitor.
When it comes to CRTs this is probably more true today that it was when this was written. I can imagine a future though where more people seek to repair their non-CRT monitors as stores stop selling normal computer monitors to push "smart" monitors filled with ads and anti-features.
I've still got a massive sony trinitron desktop monitor that stopped working properly but is so heavy I've neglected to get rid of it. I keep hoping I'll come across some old TV repair guy who can give it life again for a reasonable fee because it was honestly the best monitor I ever had and I'd love to be able to use it again with older systems even though it weighs a ton, takes up a huge amount of space, and will throw off enough heat to raise the room temperature.
> When it comes to CRTs this is probably more true today that it was when this was written. I can imagine a future though where more people seek to repair their non-CRT monitors as stores stop selling normal computer monitors to push "smart" monitors filled with ads and anti-features.
I sort of doubt this will happen. Computer monitors are used by professionals in every industry all over the world. Going the way of smart TVs - which are more consumer-facing - would not make any sense.
Smart monitors are being widely sold already and getting more common. The fact that they generate continuous income for the manufacturer after the sale is too tempting for many companies to abandon entirely.
Most likely we'll see non-smart monitors only sold in bulk to business customers, or as highly overpriced displays with limited features (like we do now with TVs) or there will be enterprise options in software (probably though management software) to disable some (but not all) of the advertising, screen-capturing, and AI functions which is just what we see now with Windows and other hardware used by enterprise customers.
Bit of a tangent but maybe this a good place to ask: I've been trying to diagnose a weird display issue on my 4K IPS monitor. It seems to have a stuck pixel, which looks bright green on a dark background. But weirdly, the pixel changes color if you move your head from left to right, cycling from bright green to hot pink to purple and then back to green (though it doesn't change color when moving your head up and down). Also, it seems to "float" slightly above the actual pixels. For ex, if I open a paint program and draw a straight vertical line directly adjacent to it, there's a gap when looked at from the right, but it seems to overlap the line when seen from the left.
Anybody experience an issue like this before, or know if it has a fix? I've searched but only find discussion of regular stuck/dead pixels.
I have, but only when I've gotten something on the monitor (like liquid droplets or thin hairs placed just right) that did funny things. Have you carefully cleaned your screen recently?
If it's not crud on the screen, then my vaguely-educated layman's guess based on the symptoms is that some part of the light guide layer between the tiny shutters and external surface of the screen [0] has gotten damaged somehow.
[0] Would this be called a polarizer? I'm not sure.
Considered that, but I've wiped, scratched, and put light pressure on the spot with no visible change. Not sure how it could have been damaged in one pixel-sized spot without affecting the surface or any surrounding pixels.
I think you have an actual tiny physical chink in the plastic or glass on the surface of the panel. Especially if you run your finger across it and can feel it.
That's exactly where the flaw likely is, on the side of the top surface layer which faces away from you. Air bubble in the plastic, or dust inclusion. If you really want to get to the bottom of it, put a 30x pocket microscope over the spot, you'll see the problem clearly. The bad news: It's neither fixable, nor covered by "dead pixel" / "stuck pixel" warranty policies.
Is it economically worthwhile to attempt to repair them? They seem to be generally reliable, and replacements of any kind are cheap. Certainly cheaper than having somebody else figure out the problem and probably cheaper than having you do it too. Especially once you add in any equipment involved, multiplied by the likelihood (low) of having to do this repeatedly.
> Is it economically worthwhile to attempt to repair them?
In a developed economy, maybe barely. Depends on the monitor, and what's wrong with it. If you're good enough at soldering, and it's just a capacitor in the power supply issue, and the case isn't going to fall apart when you open it, sure. But if you have to hire help, or replace a module, probably not.
In places where skilled labor isn't going to billed at $100/hr or more, then there's more you can do ... I don't think it's worth replacing a panel if the panel (or its wiring) go, but you can replacing modules likely makes sense, if you can source them; maybe some light module repair too if it's just cold solder joints need rewetting.
Depends on what's wrong, and how much a person's free time is worth.
The panel? No. The panel was the singular expensive part, and the cheapest and most available way to get a new panel is usually to buy it in a retail box with the rest of the monitor already wrapped around it.
The backlight tubes? Surprisingly enough: Yeah, if a person really wants to do that, and if the display uses fluorescent backlight, then sometimes the tubes are replaceable. (LED backlight is basically ubiquitous on newish displays and is, AFAIK, kind of a non-starter to dig into repairing. But it might be do-able by swapping bits from a broken panel if one were sufficiently motivated.)
Power supply bits? Sure. It's just a power supply, right? Power supplies are often repairable or replaceable. (I've repaired power supplies in LCD screens myself, and I'm pretty lousy at component-level troubleshooting.)
Broken connectors and switches such? Very repairable. (Difficulty depends a lot on how much, if any, of the board also got destroyed, but generally speaking hot air soldering is a lot easier than it looks like it should be.)
Mechanical issues, like a wonky stand or broken housing? Often repairable. (The screen I'm writing this with has a cast zinc base that broke due to metal fatigue. I've fixed it twice: Once with two part epoxy, and a second time by adding CA glue when the epoxy's grip on the zinc failed.)
If you kind of know how to fix the problem and if you are doing it in your spare time as any other house tidying activity, yes, it's worth it. Add to it the value of the fun, if you're that kind of person. If you are spending a day instead of working, probably it's not worth it unless it's a very expensive monitor.
Depends. I'm not sure you could make a business out of just fixing monitors. As another thing the phone repair shops can fix - maybe?
As for why? $ per benefit.
I had a pair of Samsung 204B screens I liked. I didn't see dollar per benefit in upgrading from 1600x1200 4:3 to 1920x1080 16:9.
They went funny, I obtained a capacitor, pop the back off, unsolder and solder new cap, put the shell back on. Job done. 20 minutes per screen because man, am I bad at soldering...
They worked happily for another 5 years each. Until society got well past the 1080p rut and into proper 1440 and 4k etc screens which were actually worth upgrading to.
1920x1200 in 23" or 24" were an OK upgrade from 1600x1200 CRT 21" for me. I did the stuff you did on an 18" 1280x1024 SPVA LCD from Fujitsu-Siemens. Since I hadn't soldered for a long time, I just bought that stuff 2 times, because the parts were a few cents only. Didn't need them 2 times, though :-) Worked for some mainboards in similar ways. Except I've been afraid to completely desolder them on mulitlayer mainboards, for fear of destroying the VIAs/through-holes. Just pulled the capacitor from it's pins still stuck in, cleaned them, and soldered the new one(s) onto the old pins. Looked like sort of a water tower in miniature, but the boards worked flawlessly afterwards. For years :-)
I have an OLED that crapped out and I didn't get around to sending it back to the OEM while in warranty. I suspect the issue is some minor component burned out, as the monitor powers on and the desktop recognizes it.
I have no idea what to do with it though and tossing it feels wrong.
I have a 4K 144 Hz 27-inch monitor I bought in December 2021, and paid nearly $850 for. These monitors still aren't a commodity good, and still end up being pretty expensive.
> With new monitors going for under $200, the costs of any significant repair are no longer justifiable unless there is something unique about your monitor.
When it comes to CRTs this is probably more true today that it was when this was written. I can imagine a future though where more people seek to repair their non-CRT monitors as stores stop selling normal computer monitors to push "smart" monitors filled with ads and anti-features.
I've still got a massive sony trinitron desktop monitor that stopped working properly but is so heavy I've neglected to get rid of it. I keep hoping I'll come across some old TV repair guy who can give it life again for a reasonable fee because it was honestly the best monitor I ever had and I'd love to be able to use it again with older systems even though it weighs a ton, takes up a huge amount of space, and will throw off enough heat to raise the room temperature.
> When it comes to CRTs this is probably more true today that it was when this was written. I can imagine a future though where more people seek to repair their non-CRT monitors as stores stop selling normal computer monitors to push "smart" monitors filled with ads and anti-features.
I sort of doubt this will happen. Computer monitors are used by professionals in every industry all over the world. Going the way of smart TVs - which are more consumer-facing - would not make any sense.
Smart monitors are being widely sold already and getting more common. The fact that they generate continuous income for the manufacturer after the sale is too tempting for many companies to abandon entirely.
Most likely we'll see non-smart monitors only sold in bulk to business customers, or as highly overpriced displays with limited features (like we do now with TVs) or there will be enterprise options in software (probably though management software) to disable some (but not all) of the advertising, screen-capturing, and AI functions which is just what we see now with Windows and other hardware used by enterprise customers.
Bit of a tangent but maybe this a good place to ask: I've been trying to diagnose a weird display issue on my 4K IPS monitor. It seems to have a stuck pixel, which looks bright green on a dark background. But weirdly, the pixel changes color if you move your head from left to right, cycling from bright green to hot pink to purple and then back to green (though it doesn't change color when moving your head up and down). Also, it seems to "float" slightly above the actual pixels. For ex, if I open a paint program and draw a straight vertical line directly adjacent to it, there's a gap when looked at from the right, but it seems to overlap the line when seen from the left.
Anybody experience an issue like this before, or know if it has a fix? I've searched but only find discussion of regular stuck/dead pixels.
> Anybody experience an issue like this before...
I have, but only when I've gotten something on the monitor (like liquid droplets or thin hairs placed just right) that did funny things. Have you carefully cleaned your screen recently?
If it's not crud on the screen, then my vaguely-educated layman's guess based on the symptoms is that some part of the light guide layer between the tiny shutters and external surface of the screen [0] has gotten damaged somehow.
[0] Would this be called a polarizer? I'm not sure.
Considered that, but I've wiped, scratched, and put light pressure on the spot with no visible change. Not sure how it could have been damaged in one pixel-sized spot without affecting the surface or any surrounding pixels.
I think you have an actual tiny physical chink in the plastic or glass on the surface of the panel. Especially if you run your finger across it and can feel it.
It feels perfectly smooth -- like the flaw is somehow between the surface and the pixel layer.
That's exactly where the flaw likely is, on the side of the top surface layer which faces away from you. Air bubble in the plastic, or dust inclusion. If you really want to get to the bottom of it, put a 30x pocket microscope over the spot, you'll see the problem clearly. The bad news: It's neither fixable, nor covered by "dead pixel" / "stuck pixel" warranty policies.
(Source: First hand experience.)
(2009) And this is about CRT monitors. Is there something like this for the LCD monitors we all use today?
Is it economically worthwhile to attempt to repair them? They seem to be generally reliable, and replacements of any kind are cheap. Certainly cheaper than having somebody else figure out the problem and probably cheaper than having you do it too. Especially once you add in any equipment involved, multiplied by the likelihood (low) of having to do this repeatedly.
> Is it economically worthwhile to attempt to repair them?
In a developed economy, maybe barely. Depends on the monitor, and what's wrong with it. If you're good enough at soldering, and it's just a capacitor in the power supply issue, and the case isn't going to fall apart when you open it, sure. But if you have to hire help, or replace a module, probably not.
In places where skilled labor isn't going to billed at $100/hr or more, then there's more you can do ... I don't think it's worth replacing a panel if the panel (or its wiring) go, but you can replacing modules likely makes sense, if you can source them; maybe some light module repair too if it's just cold solder joints need rewetting.
Depends on what's wrong, and how much a person's free time is worth.
The panel? No. The panel was the singular expensive part, and the cheapest and most available way to get a new panel is usually to buy it in a retail box with the rest of the monitor already wrapped around it.
The backlight tubes? Surprisingly enough: Yeah, if a person really wants to do that, and if the display uses fluorescent backlight, then sometimes the tubes are replaceable. (LED backlight is basically ubiquitous on newish displays and is, AFAIK, kind of a non-starter to dig into repairing. But it might be do-able by swapping bits from a broken panel if one were sufficiently motivated.)
Power supply bits? Sure. It's just a power supply, right? Power supplies are often repairable or replaceable. (I've repaired power supplies in LCD screens myself, and I'm pretty lousy at component-level troubleshooting.)
Broken connectors and switches such? Very repairable. (Difficulty depends a lot on how much, if any, of the board also got destroyed, but generally speaking hot air soldering is a lot easier than it looks like it should be.)
Mechanical issues, like a wonky stand or broken housing? Often repairable. (The screen I'm writing this with has a cast zinc base that broke due to metal fatigue. I've fixed it twice: Once with two part epoxy, and a second time by adding CA glue when the epoxy's grip on the zinc failed.)
If you kind of know how to fix the problem and if you are doing it in your spare time as any other house tidying activity, yes, it's worth it. Add to it the value of the fun, if you're that kind of person. If you are spending a day instead of working, probably it's not worth it unless it's a very expensive monitor.
Depends. I'm not sure you could make a business out of just fixing monitors. As another thing the phone repair shops can fix - maybe?
As for why? $ per benefit.
I had a pair of Samsung 204B screens I liked. I didn't see dollar per benefit in upgrading from 1600x1200 4:3 to 1920x1080 16:9.
They went funny, I obtained a capacitor, pop the back off, unsolder and solder new cap, put the shell back on. Job done. 20 minutes per screen because man, am I bad at soldering...
They worked happily for another 5 years each. Until society got well past the 1080p rut and into proper 1440 and 4k etc screens which were actually worth upgrading to.
Edit: make shorter
1920x1200 in 23" or 24" were an OK upgrade from 1600x1200 CRT 21" for me. I did the stuff you did on an 18" 1280x1024 SPVA LCD from Fujitsu-Siemens. Since I hadn't soldered for a long time, I just bought that stuff 2 times, because the parts were a few cents only. Didn't need them 2 times, though :-) Worked for some mainboards in similar ways. Except I've been afraid to completely desolder them on mulitlayer mainboards, for fear of destroying the VIAs/through-holes. Just pulled the capacitor from it's pins still stuck in, cleaned them, and soldered the new one(s) onto the old pins. Looked like sort of a water tower in miniature, but the boards worked flawlessly afterwards. For years :-)
I have an OLED that crapped out and I didn't get around to sending it back to the OEM while in warranty. I suspect the issue is some minor component burned out, as the monitor powers on and the desktop recognizes it.
I have no idea what to do with it though and tossing it feels wrong.
> replacements of any kind are cheap
Of a bog-standard 1080p 60 Hz monitor, perhaps.
I have a 4K 144 Hz 27-inch monitor I bought in December 2021, and paid nearly $850 for. These monitors still aren't a commodity good, and still end up being pretty expensive.