Tek LCD screen failure

What sort of failure? Could it be just the backlight?

Not only that, but is it past the warranty period?

Either way, a quote of $1300 to repair it is ludicrous.

Thanks for your replies.

When the scope is starting up, horizontal bars of varying display contrast flicker across the screen. After a few minutes, there are only occasional flickers, but the whole screen contrast is terrible. The white-on-grey soft menus that are displayed for instance by the "Quickmenu" button are barely visible.

Overall backlight appears uniform, and the low-med-high levels appear to work correctly.

I recall hearing years ago that folks had to pay about $1200 to fix a failed LCD. The reduced prices for LCDs obviously haven't percolated into Teks replacement parts. There is a lesser model of color Tek scope that I heard someone had to pay about $450 to fix.

It is well past the warranty period. I think I bought it in 2001. Maybe I will consider extended warranty next time. But I will also give Agilent preferential consideration!

Good day!

If you don't need more than 200MHz check out GW Instek. I bought one, very nice.

That sounds like a thermal fault, likely a loose connection or bad solder joint. Open and try heat gun or cold spray and some wiggling. I've found 80% of faults are mechanic it's the other 20% that suck. Ken

If you intend to get the external display adapter then it might be worth opening the case and examining the LCD display connectorization.

The interface has to connect conductors to glass "fingers". Sometimes high humidity settings cause crosstalk failures, and low humidity settings cause drop out failures.

Can't hurt to examine that interface if you are going to be getting the alternative display anyway. Perhaps even before you commit.

There's has a very attractive price. It's only missing a few nice things about the Tek, like the logic triggers. Well, I only took a quick look. I'm sure there's a few things. GW's has a little more record length, though, at 25k instead of 10k for Tek.

But the Tek TDS3014 is 3x the price of Instek.

The Agilent 3000 series should have put in a 4 channel model, then they could have seriously crimped these cheaper manufacturers. OOh, but Agilent 3000 has only 2.5kpts. Blah!

I will probably go for an Agilent MSO6014 in a few years. Though I could find some uses for 300MHz BW too. Just no way can afford 4 channels. I find 4ch more useful than >100MHz. My home projects are not too demanding.

I'm also extremely interested in high-resolution scopes. This is another reason why I like the Agilent MSO/DSO6000 series, which provide a high-res mode which gives effectively 12-bit res. for

CC wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news5.newsguy.com:

Yes. As a TEK scope nears the end of it's Long Term Product Support(LTPS) period,Tek raises its prices on parts and service to "encourage" owners to buy new equipment.You should check TEKs website to find the cutoff date for your model,ASAP.

Here's the TDS killer; AFTER the LTPS period is up,parts will NOT be available for your scope model,unless they share the same part number as a currently supported scope.Only CAL service will be available after the LTPS expires. NO exchange modules,they all go to TEKs salvage store as scrap.

so, what you're saying is, it was a smart idea when I bought my chinese knock off which works very good at a throw away price ?

If it changes as it warms up, you might have a decent chance of tracking down the problem with some freeze spray or a hair dryer. It was made right around the time that the defective electrolytic capacitors made an appearance, they would often start having problems when cold.

Well, the only difference it would make is that I would have to decide now whether I ever want to fix the display.

They have perhaps encouraged me to buy new equipment--from Agilent or another maker.

I wonder if Agilent and Instek do similar things?

Good day!

Yeah, I'll try to check it out one of these weekends. I have little time, so fixing stuff isn't very appealing. I'd rather spend my couple hours a week learning, programming, or designing something new, and spend money to get commercial gadgets to keep working.

Except that it is more likely an interface issue than a component issue, and the spray will likely exacerbate the problem.

It could be a wiring / contact problem. I've spend many hours trying to get my Tek DAS9200 to boot properly and read 3.5" disks without errors. I even bought a replacement hard drive and floppy disk. In the end it turned out the ribbon cables went bad. A new SCSI cable and a new floppy cable solved the problems completely.

Hi Chris,

I have a TDS3054 that had a badly flickering LCD, usually during startup or when knocked. It was just a bad connection of the LCD flex ribbon cable. Simply unplugging/replugging this cable fixed it.

Make sure you download the service manual from their web site, it explains in great detail how to get the thing apart. (It would be impossible otherwise but is straightforward with instructions).

Probably somewhere between the 'i' and the 'e' :-)

Interface seems a wrong word here. Attached would be better. Anyway, I fixed one of my own 19" panels. The wires coming from the TFT screen where torn off the TFT driver PCB because the previous owner dropped it. So I do know what a TFT screen looks like on the inside.

What part of the meaning of the word "interface" do you not understand?

Do you know how conductor elements are INTERFACED to an LCD panel?

That's encouraging.

That's funny. A lot of things are like this.

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a try.

Good day!

That's the point. The problem already makes the scope unusable, some freeze spray won't break it any worse.