Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

[Maxxarcade]

I recently recapped a 15" Kristel LP LCD that was used in an arcade game.

It was flickering as if the backlight was going bad, but I opened it up and found several bulging Teapo caps on the main PCB. I replaced them, only to find that it still flickered.

I took it back out and went over it with my ESR meter and found that all 27 caps on the board, from the larger 1000uf caps to the miniature 22uf caps were all bad, most of them being totally open. After a complete recap with some UCC KY series caps, it is working like new again. Every cap on the board was Teapo.

Anyone else ever run across LCD monitors that have toasted caps? This thing was only a year or two old.

I prefer to stick to Samsung LCD's, but I've got my eye on a Sceptre 20.1" that has a 1000:1 contrast ratio. Since it only costs ~$230, the odds are probably pretty good that It will have crap caps too.

[willawake]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

any idea who made the board?

never heard of sceptre....

although i like samsung i will probably go for an eizo for my next one. They dont skimp on quality of components or caps. 5 year guarantee and 6 months zero pixel defect here. the new panels are PVA/MVA with overdrive technology to get the usually slow panels to do faster refresh. I dont know how good that technology has become but i prefer PVA/MVA for better colour reproduction. i am not interested in games that much.

[kc8adu]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

i have already had several sceptre 20" lcd here with bad caps.
also several noname lcd's with teapo caps with every last one open.
even samsungs with every lytic in it open.these were in robots for loading beer so we joke they got the robot drunk and it puked thru its caps.

[willawake]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

i wanna robot to load me beer. is there one with badcaps?

[Big Pope]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

Due to the temp is really very hot at a part of LCD monitor, i expect there is much badcaps inside LCD monitors in future.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

I assume that there are only very very few LCD`s with good caps on the market.
I would not consider any of the mass market brands as using quality caps.

Well ok, in some tft`s, the tubes or the backlight inverter is death b4 the cpas go, but as laways, you don`t know what problem was the first.
There are way to many bad TFT`s around there, if i compare it with CRT, the desing and the overal funktion of an TFT is far less komplex and thus it should for most producer possible, to make them at least lasting 5 years +.
But as this is not the case, i would say component quality is the only thing wich is left.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

I've had good luck with Samsung LCD's, there are lots of them in the countertop games where I work. We have yet to find a bad one, despite having several machines get a fan failure and kill the motherboard, hard drive, and PSU from overheating.

But I haven't been bitten by the LCD bug yet, I just bought a used Sony GDM-FW900 24" CRT to replace my last Sun/Sony trinitron monitor, which I wore the CRT out on to the point that the windows taskbar was burned into the phosphor. I'm still using it at work, and no symptoms of bad caps yet. I think it was a GDM-5010, 21".

[PeteS in CA]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

Is that the ~96 pound wide-screen monitor? When Sun was evaluating it, the engineer in charge of the project probably weighed only slightly more than the monitor. I had to help her with unpacking and lifting the things.

[Maxxarcade]

Re: Bad Teapos in a Kristel LCD

Yep, it's heavy

I've also heard that they are somewhat unreliable, which is why I also ordered the service manual

Though I'd say, if it's like my last monitor, it will last a long time. Any monitor that runs longer than the CRT lifetime is doing well by today's standards