dudes-- my neighbors moved, and i saw lying down in their left behind trash, this flat screen monitor, maybe a 17" or so. covered in some really bad goo. but i grabbed it, and it seems intact, but the screen appears to be covered by a soft plastic film which has bubbled. it needs to be cleaned and i wonder how aggressive i can be with soap and water and stuff w/o goobering up electronics. is it even worth trying to find out if it works?

recommends?

shrinkboy

OK... I'm assuming here that this is a computer monitor you're talkling about...

Monitors (and TV's) are very robust critters. They'll survive gettinig rained on, muddy, etc, for the most part. Water doesn't really hurt electronics, provided, of course, that the water and the power aren't in the electronics at the same time. From your description, it sounds like the monitor was laying on the ground and got rained on. First, I'd suggest taking the cover off, and making sure that there isn't too much crud on the board, and that it's dry inside. Remove the cover and the tin sheilding (if present). Check to make sure that there isn't any mud in there, and that the board is clean and dry. If not, clean it out, taking care not to zap yourself on the HV sections in the off chance the thing still has a charge. Be sure that the tube isn't broken, and that the neck board is firmly connected. Look for obvious signs that something arced - like burnt marks, cracked flyback, etc. Look for bulging capacitors, check the fuse, etc.

To clean the screen, just use water and a soft cloth or even a paper towel. If the antiglare coating has started to flake off, it is possible to remove it entirely and restore an even appearance, but it will take some work, and I'd suggest leaving that for once you get the thing working.

Once you've verified that it's clean and dry inside, and let it dry if it wasn't, you're ready to test it. Plug it in, and hit the switch. The light should come on, and will probably be orange, indicating no sync. If you get a tick-tick-tick, and the light flashes, or if the light won't come on at all, you've got something wrong, more than likely the HOT (horizontal output tube). If smoke comes out, or if it catches fire, than it is more than likely not worth messing with.

If it powers on, you're ready to hook it up to a computer. Shut it off, and connect it to a computer. I'd use an old, junk PC, just in case, although I have _never_ seen a monitor fry a computer. I just have an old 486 I use with a simple bootable DOS disk with an image viewer and a test pattern. Hook up the monitor and turn it (and the computer) on. If if works, you're home free. Just clean the monitor up and put it back together. If you're missing a color, than more than likely the cable is damaged. Check to make sure that none of the pins are broken or bent together. There is typically one missing pin, but it's supposed to be like that. The important ones are 1, 2 and 3 - which are the Red, Green and Blue signals, respectively. If the cable is detachable, replace it, if not, try wiggleing it and bending it near the connector and near where it enters the monitor. Since the signal lines are thin, coaxial cable, they get damaged easily if the cable is bent sharply against a wall or something.

This should be enough to get you started - let us know how things go. If the monitor needs any signifigant repairs, it's probably not worth messing with at this point. Computer monitors are cheap and easy to get used. A good 17" typically goes for $50 or less. Be on the lookout though, some newer monitors (in the last 3 years especially) are total crap. Don't even bother with cheap, poorly made monitors. I've seen AOC moniitors and KDS monitors that had absolutely horribly DC restoration, right out of the box. Distorted and fuzzy picture is pretty common too. Monitors shipped with OEM systems like Hewlett Packards and Compaqs (the consumer ones, anyway) are garbage too. If it says Packard Bell, don't even waste the time to plug it in. Dell monitors (the business grade ones anyway) are typically very good, they're typically Sony monitors. Viewsonic, Sanyo, Hitachi and Mitsubishi also make good monitors. Sun and SGI monitors are excellent, they're almost always Sony sets. They typically need to be hacked to work on a clone though.

And a final word of warning - if you see one of those gawdawful LCD monitors, run. Run away. Far away. I have never seen one with a good, sharp picture or good color, and have never seen one that didn't totally kill my eyes. It's not worth wasting the time looking at them in the stores. The technology isn't there yet. Not even close.

Agh. This turned into a rant... I need to control myself. No more posting before coffee... Anyway, let us know how you turn out with the monitor. Believe it or not, most of the monitors I've found work just fine. People just throw them out because they get larger ones, or they buy a new PC/Clone that comes with one and get rid of the old (typically better) monitor. A while ago, I found an absolutely gorgeous Viewsonic monitor in the trash. Thing looked brand new - it was a very expensive monitor when it was new, and it was only 4 years old. Perfect, crystal clear picture. People are wasteful and stupid.

-Ian

Aren't the Vizon series monitors LCD-flatscreens? I remember seeing them in the stores once. Anyway, -if the screen is bubbling and there is goo then the screen's probably cracked and thats the ink-gel leaking out. Definitely not worth the fix then. Good Luck,
Tom

yes, it's an lcd flat screen, with cable input, s-video, composite inputs, dig. in, and so on. there does not appear to be a crack in the screen. i will do more vigorous cleaning today and report back

I would just plug it in and see if it works, then worry about cleaning it. I would be careful about getting anything potentially corrosive under the edges of the bezel. It could damage the fragile connections to the LCD panel. They are literally glued to the glass screen and are impossible to repair without special equipment. There's no significant amount of liquid, or gel inside an LCD screen, so it couldn't be that leaking out. Even a totally smashed LCD screen doesn't have a noticeable amount of stuff leaking out. LCDs do have a plastic polarizing film over them which could have been damaged be heat, or chemicals. If that's the case, it's junk.

As far as computer monitors go...
We have a Dell LCD flat panel in the radio station control room...in use 18hrs a day. Have had it about a year and no trouble...looks good to me. Will see how it holds up. In my office we have some 6 year old generic VGA monitors...crt's still good. Turning off the monitor when leaving for the day seems to really help the CRT life.

At our repair shop we have a $1.99 goodwill special 1991 NEC multisync...still working good. Got a Compaq 17" at Goodwill last week and I tripped on the curb and the doggone thing fell 5 feet to the concrete...thought it was a gonner but got it home and it powered up and works fine!

My IBM Aptiva 595 computer is on its third monitor since I bought the system five years ago. The original monitor quit three months or so after I got the system home; was able to get it replaced under warranty. Four years later, the replacement started acting strangely and eventually quit, so I went to the local Best Buy and purchased a Hewlett-Packard mx70 17" monitor. That did it. The HP has been working like a champ ever since (about a year now). I use my computer a lot (every day, sometimes several hours a day all told), but I would think most monitors would stand up to this kind of use or worse. (The flat-panel monitor in the control room at the radio station where Chad works is another example; if it can go 18 hours a day for a year without problems, it must be a very good make.) Why I've gone through two CRT monitors in five years puzzles me. Did I get two bad monitors (the original and its replacement) before finding a good one in the HP? BTW: The two monitors that went West were probably cheap generic units. It wouldn't surprise me if they were, as there was no recognizable brand name that I could see anywhere on either of them.

BTW (2): I remember reading somewhere, here or elsewhere, that Hewlett-Packard's computer monitors are not now and have not been made by HP itself for years. If they are no longer manufactured by HP, who does make them these days? My mx70 does have the "hp" badge above the CRT, and the legend "hp pavilion mx70" above the control panel; however, I doubt very much that it was actually made by HP. Probably, like everything else, this monitor (and my HP DeskJet 832C printer as well) were made by some offshore company. NEC, perhaps? :dunno:

I've generally found that most monitors made in the last couple years suck.. Plain and simple. Especially the junk you'll find at Best Buy and the like. The monitors I use on a daily basis are well over ten years old and still produce a stunning, sharp picture. They're 17" monitors, made for Sun and SGI by Sony. They don't have the proper input lines to connect to anything but an SGI or a Sun, but with a little rewiring they work great on anything. I've also got an old HP monitor, made over ten years ago, back when ViewSonic made the HP monitors, and it's never given me a problem in the seven years I've had it, I bought it used in the first place. I've got a good assortment of other old monitors, most of which I got free or broken, and I've never really had problems with them while in service here. I also regularly use some 20+ year old terminals, including a Lear Siegler ADM3A. Aside from a tired and somewhat dim tube in the ADM3A, they all work fine.

The trick is to avoid the cheap new consumer garbage and go for outdated business scrap - it's like night and day in terms of quality, functionality and reliability.

-Ian

Retro hacker, what do you have those terminals hooked up to? I'm working on a project with a thrift-store IBM pentium running Linux which can connect to the internet...this will then serve some of my terminals and apple computers, etc. with information.

We have had some VGA monitors at the shop which still worked but the CRT was so dim that we really couldn't use them anymore (electronics still worked well though).

And a final word of warning - if you see one of those gawdawful LCD monitors, run. Run away. Far away. I have never seen one with a good, sharp picture or good color, and have never seen one that didn't totally kill my eyes. It's not worth wasting the time looking at them in the stores. The technology isn't there yet. Not even close.


-Ian


Ian, aren't the LCD monitors used with computers based on the same technology used with flat-panel TVs? If not, what's the difference? It would seem to me that if LCD computer monitor technology isn't what it should be, yet, anyway, then today's flat-panel LCD televisions likely also have a long way to go before they are ready for the consumer market (like high definition TV itself, but that's another story). I get Officemax's catalog every few months, and have seen photographs in it of FP LCD monitors which show the OMX logo just fine.

Just a guess, but I'm thinking perhaps the LCDs you've seen may have been out of adjustment. Even so, the FS computer monitors should have a reset switch or an onscreen menu selection which returns the controls to their factory defaults, which themselves may be faulty. Many times these default values are determined on the basis of correct colors obtained using a color-bar pattern from a generator; it may be as well that the controls' own ranges are set using the same signal, not the actual video output from a computer. These in-house generated signals are not the same as the video signals a monitor receives from an actual computer; this means the color rendition on an online image will almost always differ from the closed-circuit video signal with which the monitor has probably been initially adjusted and tested. The only flat-screen LCD monitors I'd trust for really good image rendition would be Sony, Mitsubishi or any other make with a solid reputation for quality (my Hewlett-Packard mx70 has served me well the last year or so, and has outlasted two other monitors I've had on this computer in the last five years; maybe it was made by Sony, Mitsu or some other well-known company for HP? :dunno: )

First off, just last week, my old monitor,(a 15" viewsonic, with a fine tube) , died on me. At first I thiught It had a shutdown problem, or possible a Power supply problem(I would hit the switch, and it would blink the LED green, and back off. ) Then.,. I noticed that I heard arcing noises from the area of the switch itself ,and that if I poked it a few times, the power would come on, and stay there.. for a while. THEN, later the same day, it would not come on and stay, just make arcing noises from the switch.

SO-- off the cover comes. I figured to find a bad switch, and hoped it would be easy to replace, if not, I would wire around it, and allow the "smart power" (auto shotdown when idle) feature to control the power for me. Well the switch itself was fine, BUT the terminal had broken loose from the board, and arced the trace. Cleaned off the trace, resoldered both terminals, did a little PM, in the Horoz. and vert. areas, where some connections were getting marginal, and closed her up, (after checking for operation first). Fine now, the old monitor will probably go a while longer(it has a '97 date on it)

As for LCD's, I really never was a big fan of them.... BUT they have REALLY come a long way, in the last 20 years or so. I remember, when LCD color tv's were the latest "have to have "item in portable electronics, the pictures were NOT good, and the prices were high(generally well over $250), the same with early laptop screens. NOW-- LCD's look pretty good, the "off axis" viewing problem is not nearly as bad as before, the refresh rates are a lot higher, and they generally look quite good, overall. Not to mention, the prices are reasonable, too (in under 20" sizes at least)

I dislike LCD's for several reasons, but I also do admit that the picture has gotten better in the last couple years, but it's not there yet, as far as I can tell. Viewing an LCD from an angle still results in a dimmer, less crisp picture. Granted, it doesn't disappear completely like it used to - active matrix LCD technology has helped that one. But still, it's a pain to try and see anything on an LCD if you're not directly in front of it. Also, the contrast ratio and color levels seem severely lacking when compared to a good CRT. The LCD's always seem washed out, or too bright/too dim. Fiddleing with settings can help, but typically doesn't produce an acceptable picture. Slow refresh times used to be a big issue, not so much a anymore - but it's still not there yet. Also, as LCD's get old, they start to develop streaking problems, where something like a window in a graphical environment will cause these continuing "streaks" from the edge of the window to the edge of the screen. Not good. I've also been disappointed in the clarity of text on LCD's. It just never seems as crisp as a good CRT (of course, nothing can beat a good TTL monochrome monitor). Even with the sub-pixel rendering turned on, it still doesn't quite look right. Not to mention all the little quirks with LCD's, the fact that they only work properly at their native resolution, and emulating lower resolution modes results in everything getting blocky. Also, the PC LCD's that have an analog video connector have quirks with getting 'synced' to the PC, otherwise everything jitters. Couple these problems with the poor construction of most PC LCD's - substandard and flakey backlights and inverter supplies, the pain and hassle of external power bricks that overheat and burn up. Not to mention that with an LCD there isn't anyplace to pile disks and CD's and junk...

-Ian

Retro hacker, what do you have those terminals hooked up to? I'm working on a project with a thrift-store IBM pentium running Linux which can connect to the internet...this will then serve some of my terminals and apple computers, etc. with information.

I've got terminals hooked up to everything :) My main PC has a couple terminals hooked up to it, as do a couple other PC/Clone systems around here. A couple machines, like my RS/6000, and the clone I use as a webserver don't even have video cards, just terminals. My Apple IIe is connected to a PC through the serial line, and with Kermit and other terminal programs, I can do just about everything from the Apple. Download a file with Lynx to the PC, copy it into a RAM disk on the Apple, then reboot the Apple with a disk utility and copy the disk image from RAM onto a floppy.

Adding a terminal to a Linux machine easy. Just add a line to your /etc/inittab file that sets up getty to listen on the port. Something like :

T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 att4410

Will set up /dev/ttyS0 to talk to an AT&T terminal, at 9600 baud.

T1:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 19200 vt100

Will set up /dev/ttyS1 to talk to a DEC VT100 terminal at 19200 baud.

Just make sure you have the proper terminal definitions set up so that Linux knows how to talk to your terminal. VT100 should always be there, and most common ones like Wyse and the ADM3A are probably already there, more unusual entries will have to be added to the terminfo database from the master one available online.

Physical connection of the terminal is also pretty straightforward, just wire up a null modem cable to go from the nine pin port on the back of the clone to the (probably 25 pin) port on the terminal. Some terminals used male connectors, others used female, it's just a matter of what your terminal uses. Linux also supports more than just the two built-in serial ports on the average clone motherboard. You can also use PCI and ISA serial cards, and those USB to serial converters.

I love Linux.

-Ian

fellows-- the POS trassh-find Sanyo Vizon which spawned this learned discourse on monitor technology (thanx for your lengthy post, RH!) has revealed the faint outline of the spidering web of a screen fracture beneath the filth. so into the bin it goes. thought i had one of those legendary trash find items so often mentioned hereabouts....thanx again fellas

shrinkboy

First off, just last week, my old monitor,(a 15" viewsonic, with a fine tube) , died on me. At first I thiught It had a shutdown problem, or possible a Power supply problem(I would hit the switch, and it would blink the LED green, and back off. ) Then.,. I noticed that I heard arcing noises from the area of the switch itself ,and that if I poked it a few times, the power would come on, and stay there.. for a while. THEN, later the same day, it would not come on and stay, just make arcing noises from the switch.

SO-- off the cover comes. I figured to find a bad switch, and hoped it would be easy to replace, if not, I would wire around it, and allow the "smart power" (auto shotdown when idle) feature to control the power for me. Well the switch itself was fine, BUT the terminal had broken loose from the board, and arced the trace. Cleaned off the trace, resoldered both terminals, did a little PM, in the Horoz. and vert. areas, where some connections were getting marginal, and closed her up, (after checking for operation first). Fine now, the old monitor will probably go a while longer(it has a '97 date on it)

As for LCD's, I really never was a big fan of them.... BUT they have REALLY come a long way, in the last 20 years or so. I remember, when LCD color tv's were the latest "have to have "item in portable electronics, the pictures were NOT good, and the prices were high(generally well over $250), the same with early laptop screens. NOW-- LCD's look pretty good, the "off axis" viewing problem is not nearly as bad as before, the refresh rates are a lot higher, and they generally look quite good, overall. Not to mention, the prices are reasonable, too (in under 20" sizes at least)


Myself, I have two computers that I use a lot, both Pentium II's, a Gateway 266 MHz and an IBM Thinkpad 366 MHz. They were made in 1998 and 1999 respectively. My Gateway monitor I got with this system was arcing a bit and the picture was fuzzy so until I can crack it open, I am using a 1992 Dell monitor that we have with an early Dell 486 system (which I still have and Mom still uses). The only downside is the monitor cannot display 1024 x 768 so I'm stuck on 800 X 600, but I can't complain.

I do think LCD's have come a long way, they are not perfect but I wouldn't mind having one because they do take up less space.

I agree the old business stuff is fantastic. I have an older HP Vectra Pentium 2 and that thing is built like a tank. My main computer is a Dell with a flat screen. I don't think the picture quality is bad at all. (too bad their customer service sucks) I went with a flat screen to save space. I don't miss having the screen right in front of me. I'm setting up another system as well, but am going with the flat screen that came with it. As for some of Best Buys "deals".... save your reciept if you want to return anything to them. I have a new flat panel that I haven't even opened, and now I probably have to list it on eBay. :(