Sources for LCD Inverter repair tutorials?

I saw an 'instructable' regarding replacing many inverters with a generic unit. Try this search link:

Since then, inverters have come down in price. Do an eBay search for your unit and you might find one cheaply enough to make repair uneconomical.

jak

In general, there are only a few things that fail on them - fuses which may not look like any fuse you would immediately recognise, transistors (often surface mount, but can be traditional thru' hole), transformers (some available, but most not) and the occasional output capacitor. You can find most of these things with a simple multimeter, but as Jak says, there are many places selling backlight inverters for both TV and monitor applications, so unless you are repairing an original just for the fun and experience, it's often more cost effective to just replace the whole board. Be careful when playing with them. Although not particularly dangerous, they can give you a nasty little 'bite' when they are operating ... :-)

Arfa

An inverter boosts the voltage up to thousands of volts for the cold fluorescent backlighting of the panel. You can look up the principal by doing a web search for dc-dc inverters. Personally I wouldn't mess with repairing them unless the device was my own or a friends and even then I would look first for a OEM replacement.

are you sure it's the inverters? These Apple monitors have relatively studly inverters and they drive the tubes quite hard. More often the tubes have plain worn out.

As is often the case with Apple stuff, you can't just fit in a generic replacement.

They have custom brightness signals and lamp-out feedback signals that have to be just right. And the repair manuals are mostly useless as they don't give any useful details.

On Sun, 7 Dec 2008 10:46:40 -0800 (PST), Ancient_Hacker put finger to keyboard and composed:

Studly inverters tend to do that. :-)

- Franc Zabkar

Yep, and that's because the inverters are considered safety-critical because of the high voltages. No Apple tech will try to 'repair' one, just replace. Replacements aren't terribly expensive, but only a certified program-subscribing Apple affiliate can buy them from the Apple warehouse.

Either find an Apple-sanctioned repair shop, or ask Apple about mail-in repair. If there's any chance the displays are under warranty, asking Apple is a good idea, anyhow (they track warranties by serial number, regardless of owner).

Thanks to all for your input! The monitors are mine, and I thought this might be a good learning experience to attempt a fix since flat-screens are everywhere these days.

I found an LCD repair supply company (lcdparts.net) that makes a redesigned inverter for at least one of these monitors--at about $130 a pop. THese would certainly be cheaper and less expensive to acquire than an original Apple unit.

I've got a smaller project I'll attampt first: a Brookstone 7" digital picture frame (no OEM info available, unfortunately) whose backlights blink on and off about once per second. As far as I can tell the main CPU module works well as it loads and displays the pics off a memory card just fine.