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Inverted colors after an (almost) successful iPod Touch repair

Anyone here with iPod repair experience?

Taking this thing (iPod Touch, 2nd version) apart was a separate long story but it turned out that putting it back together is yet another challenge. Needed to replace a faulty battery. For that the glass touch screen, the LCD and the metal bracket had to come off. The darn thing had all parts glued together with thin layer of what looks like non-drying silicon goo. Mr. Jobs *REALLY* didn't want me to repair his products, I gather. As if I needed another reminder never to buy Apple devices... But I digress.

Took some gentle prying of the parts apart and praying that LCD won't crack while I was doing that. So, I soldered the new battery, put all parts back in the reverse order and - bingo! Everything came back to life except for one thing: the colors on the display are now inverted. What gives? The LCD module seems to be a self-contained digital display with serial communication through its connector (way too few contacts for anything else) - so if I put it back wrong or if it's a bad connection, you would think the whole display won't work. Needless to say, I re-connected the ribbon cable several times to no avail.

Does anyone have and idea of what hardware issue associated with disconnecting/reconnecting the LCD module can lead to inverted colors?

Reply to
passerby
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Could there have been a settings change to a hard-of-seeing option ?

Reply to
N_Cook

passerby udtrykte præcist:

Could it be a reversed polarizing filter in front of the screen? Or perhaps I am totally confusing technologies...

Leif

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Reply to
Leif Neland

Thank you for your replies, guys! I did think about a polarized filter of sorts because it does in fact look like a polarized filter got reversed! But there's only one orientation of the glass that it can possibly go back to and the mylar backing (never heard of polarized backing, but who knows) stayed on the LCD all the time, 'cause it was glued. In other words, if anything is polarized, it went right back to the original orientation, so should not have caused any issue.

I looked around for a different color scheme (better visibility option) - but could not locate any. Sorry, not a big iPod user - it's my son's device. If there's such a software option that can reverse colors, please advise.

Reply to
passerby

What exactly do you mean by "reversed colors"? You need a color pallet for the device to know how the colors relate. Problem could be just a single connection to the display that is not making contact.

Paul

Reply to
Paul Drahn

"Inverted" was the best I could describe it. For example, when the iPod starts, there should be a white apple on black background. It's now black apple on white. I can kind of sort of see the menus but they look washed out (although black text is still black, which is weird). Sometimes it might look like one of the colors (most likely green) is missing, but then on some screens you would see a bit of green anyway (for example, the battery icon is green or yellow green anyway). All the icons are in wrong/odd colors

If this was a VGA display and it was behaving like that, I would have thought a single connection is missing, too. V and H are fine - all shapes are correct, I definitely see blue and red. Green looks weird or missing, so I would go search for a problem with the G connection. But this is a digital LCD display, I don't believe it's controlled by the same principal. So, if the connector was off, the whole thing would probably be dark or at least look seriously messed up.

Reply to
passerby

Some LCD panels are connected to their drive circuitry via a "zebra connector"... a strip of an elastomer which has alternating layers or slices of conductive and insulating material. Typically these are held against the LCD and mother circuit boards by pressure.

I believe that a color LCD is likely to have a repeated pattern of row or column driver contacts. If such an LCD was slightly misaligned when it was fastened down and pressed against the zebra connector, it's entirely possible that this would result in a "shift" in the driver connections, one or two rows or columns to one side. If the pattern happened to be (e.g.) RGBRGBRGB, then you might end up driving the signals to the (e.g.) GBRGBRGBR columns or rows instead. In other words, the physical misalignment would "rotate" the color through one third of the colorspace... and this could be the "inverted" effect you've been seeing.

Another type of misalignment or bending of a zebra connection might result in two of the three colors being OK, and the other one being wrong, I suppose.

Reply to
David Platt

I dislike these devices as well but have tackled a few for family members. I had a similar experience after replacing the battery - display had miscolored moire effect. Replugging, jiggling did nothing. Ordering a new LCD screen fixed the issue. Frustrating as I never determined cause. I know I failed to power down before disassembly so my best guess was that plugging/unplugging while powered up might have caused the problem.

"passerby" wrote in message news:4f50$51f88ffa$43de0cc0$ snipped-for-privacy@news.flashnewsgroups.com...

Reply to
John Keiser

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