Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

[dkaardal]

first foray into troubleshooting this sort of thing, and the last few days of scouring the forums have been very illuminating! I've not found anything that looks quite like the issue I'm seeing however, so I was hoping that there might be a few forum members who might have some thoughts on where the issue might lie with this monitor.

Monitor: Dell U3011t Rev A03

Screen01.jpg = this is the screen attached to a Windows 7 laptop. As you can see, 3 of the 4 quadrants of the monitor are acting badly. The upper right quadrant works just fine though, oddly enough.

the OSD also is affected.

This is the monitors default state from power-on.

Troubleshooting so far:

1: I've visually checked the boards and components, and nothing really jumps out at me. Nothing bulging, no scorch marks, nothing actively on fire.

2: I've removed all cables and reseated them, including the ribbon cables that are attached to the TCon board underneath the boards in the pictures. ( I didn't take pics of it unfortunately, but I included one of the pictures from kishisaki's thread as an example). No change in behaviour at all.

3: Messed about with SoftMCCS just to make sure that resetting everything to factory defaults didn't magically fix things (it didn't)


Next Steps

I'll start checking as many of the components as I can with my multimeter, but if someone has seen this sort of thing before and can point me in a better direction I'd REALLY appreciate it! I don't mind buying replacement boards if I have to, but as I'm a fair hand with a soldering iron I'd be much happier if it turned out to be something simple like, well, bad caps or something.



I'll keep this thread updated as I go through the steps to figure out the problem with this beast, but again if anyone has one of those 'a HA!' moments, I'd love to hear about it.

Donovan.

[dkaardal]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

More troubleshooting:

I opened the panel up completely so that I could check the ribbon cables that come out of the LCD panel itself - looking around the forums it seems that that is a way to check to see if the problem is with the panel itself.

No change to the image displayed on the screen at all when I poked the ribbon cables as the monitor was running.

I've ordered a TCON board to test with this monitor. I'll update the thread once I've had a chance to plug it in.

[dkaardal]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

new TCON board didn't do anything. I picked up another old monitor to see if I could swap parts over, but the second monitor shows a similar issue (though only over 1/2 of the screen.)

I guess both of them have LCD problems, but when I fiddle with the ribbon cables that go into the screens, there is no change at all to the image displayed (on either monitor). I assumed that this meant it wasn't a tab bond problem, but now...

Not really sure where to go from here. Is there some sure-fired way to nail down the issue to the LCD itself?

:/

[jetadm123]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

You might still want to swap boards from the 2nd monitor over to the first (or vice versa) to see if you can re-create the 1/2 screen problem on the first monitor. At least you should be able to narrow down which board is causing the problem.

[dkaardal]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

Thanks for responding - I've swapped the backs between monitors a few times, but there's no change.

See attached pics for Monitor2 with the back unit (Power supply + Controller board) from Monitor1, using the new TCON board (which I mentally label TCON3)

This is the same behaviour of Monitor2 with all of it's own original components installed.

Monitor1 always has 3/4 of the screen messed up even with the components of Monitor2 installed in it.

Logically, the LCD panels are borked - but I'd expect to see something happen if I played around with the tabs going into the LCDs... and I don't.

I will say they are VERY hot to the touch though! Hot enough that I'd not be able to keep a finger on them for more then 5 seconds without being in real pain.

[dkaardal]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

Hmm, something different now.

ok, I took Monitor2 apart again and reseated all the cables that go to the TCON board (TCON3). I put a but of electrical tape across the two cables that connect from the controller board to the TCON board, just because they seemed to be ever so slightly loose where they connect to the TCON board.

I also was very careful when I reseated the ribbon cables that go from the TCON board to the two long boards at the top of the LCD. Those ribbon cables don't seem to fit into the slots as perfectly as I'd have expected. There is a small amount of side-to-side play on them when they're slotted into the connectors, before you enable the locking leaver. They also seem to be able to go into the connecter deeper on one side then on the other.

Odd, in my experience.

Anyway, Monitor2 with TCON3, Controller1 and PS1 now has a different look - see attached.

Running through flat colour test screens, the monitor looks good - though the OSD overlay seems to be a bit wonky on the left side.

The DELL logo on monitor startup looks perfect.

On the desktop, I can now see a full image - though the left hand side is now showing horizontal lines/artifacts.

definitely puzzling... but kinda fun!

[dkaardal]

Re: Dell 30" U3011t - lines / video corruption in 3/4 of screen

Just an update - more for future reference then anything else.

I noticed that the frequency settings were looking very odd in softMCCS.

Setting the resolution VERY low (i.e. 800x600) gives me a perfectly stable screen. This made me think it might be the EDID in the EEPROM of the port I was using. Creating a custom .inf file to override the EDID and force a the monitor to accept the correct timings did nothing however, so I won't go through the pain of reprogremming the EEPROMS. I have limited options for ports to try though, so I might switch my troubleshooting from my old laptop to a desktop machine of some sort.

Next step (after testing all the inputs) is to pull out the multimeter and start walking though all the components on the mainboard.