is an lcd panel with a broken ribbon cable unfixable pricelist

If that"s the case it should be fairly straight-forward. I"m guessing you already have the screen off; otherwise it wouldn"t have broken, so you probably know how to do that part.

Once the screen is off, you just have to remove the rear cover to get to where the LCD is plugged into the motherboard. Basically just take out a zillion screws, take off the back and flip it over. That whole procedure is shown in this video teardown; all you have to do is follow it up to about the 13:43 mark.

And of course you"ll need a replacement flex cable; you can find those all over the place; eBay, Amazon, AliExpress, etc. Here"s one of the first ones that came up on a search.

Dead LCD pixels, fading LCD pixel on the instrument cluster are quite bad looking parts of a good car’s interior, so it is understandable that you may want to get it fixed. Replacement of the complete unit is quite expensive, that is why we try to encourage people to get it fixed by a professional on half price, or do the ribbon cable replacement at home on tenth price. As we sell quality flexible ribbon cables, bulbs / lamps only for DIY repair. This very common pixel failure is known on several units, like dashboard instrument cluster (speedometer), MID, and radio units, OBC (on board computer), and SID, and happen to several CAR manufacturers that use Siemens VDO electronics such as BMW 3 5 7 series, Audi A3 A4 A6 A8, VW, Seat, Mercedes C and E class, SAAB & Rover - you will find several different models on our site.

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The newer ribbon type DMDs are notorious for being unrepairable. This is due to the carbon traces used on the display glass. If a ribbon cable gets damaged, it"s otherwise not a big deal to replace it and run jumpers. This has been tried before many times but nobody has reported they have fixed dead lines on these things. I read soldering the carbon pads on the glass could not be done.

I got this one from a bulk trade and figured I would try and fix it since it"s otherwise a paperweight. I suspected the top left ribbon cable but then realized after gently flexing the cable various directions that was not the case. So I carefully used a spudger tool to separate the glass from the PCB and gently remove the row ribbon cable a little bit at a time.

I narrowed the issue down to a column driver IC in the immediate area of the affected lines. I put this under a component microscope and found all 16 legs on the ribbon cable side closest to the top of the DMD were separated from the board. A quick drag solder technique with plenty of flux cleaned that up.

Now the fabled un-fixable ribbon cable. Legend has it that many aspiring techs have tried to tackle this wild beast in the past and have failed. I dug up this quote from another thread which pinpoints exactly why:

So I tried to convince myself to leave the ribbon cable in place, as I was able to tin all 32 leads on the board without trouble. But I realized the cable was trashed at the section where it meets the board. I tried to solder but the plastic cable started melting immediately.

After scraping off what appeared to be conductive adhesive, I tried to tin the pads on the glass with solder. At first I had no luck, but with enough flux and scraping away the remaining residue I was actually able to tin one the leads. Yay!!

Now the really nerve wracking part... soldering all 32 jumper wires and crossing my fingers. I used silicone wire because of its flexibility, trying to avoid any stress on any of the carbon pads. At first this was working pretty well. But the occasional wire would become desoldered as I moved along tacking on the neighboring ones. What really killed my momentum was seeing the desoldered wires take the actual carbon pads with them. When trying to re-attach the jumpers, there was no carbon left at all to grab on to. NOOO!!

So even though I was I able to solder to the carbon pads on the glass itself, the adhesion of the carbon after 24 years on this 1996 Cherry display was compromised and it lifted right off the glass. Not sure why, maybe it was heat during operation or heat when soldering that caused it. Or maybe just a poor printing process in general. Since I knew this was a failure I removed the remaining jumpers from the glass. Some were connected well, others didn"t take much force to pull off.

Like anything using proprietary parts that are NLA, it depends on the impact to the system operation. Many of the pre-built desktops from the big names (Dell included) now use mainboards that won"t fit into other than the chassis they ship in -- and use proprietary wiring, power supplies, etc. So it"s either expensive parts replacement (it takes a long time for refurbished parts to completely disappear from the marketplace) or a complete system replacement.

It"s not an issue unique to computers - it"s becoming common with automobiles. Once a module becomes NLA, if it"s critical to vehicle operation, the car becomes a total loss. Just look at any one of the cars these days having a completely LCD display system in the dashboard -- what are the chances that in 10-20 years, these parts will still be available?

Building custom cables is one thing -- designing a complete aftermarket dash display is quite another. Yes, repair is possible - but with highly integrated displays depending on hundreds or more discrete, under-$1.00 components not available to the repair industry, we"ve likely reached a point where in 20-30 years, today"s cars will not be tomorrow"s classics -- they will have been long recycled into something else.

Vertical lines appearing on LCD screen is very common. Whether the screen belongs to a laptop computer or desktop PC, mobile phone, or even a television, the fault is usually due to the ribbon cable and its connections.

A faulty ribbon cable can cause all sorts of havoc manifesting in bright vertical lines. Sometimes they can be coloured lines such as blue, green, grey, black, and red. The lines can appear thick or thin and on just one-half of the screen. Sometimes the fault will manifest as two vertical white lines. You can even get horizontal lines as well.

If you have lines appearing on the LCD screen, then the first simple thing to check is the seating of the ribbon cable that connects the display panel to the motherboard. Most of the time, the fault is with the poor connection made by the ribbon cable.

One of the most common problems with ribbon cables is oxidation of the contacts. It can happen either on the ribbon cable contacts or on the socket contacts. Manufacturers often use a mix of gold and copper for the electrical contacts, however, if they have not used enough gold, then oxidation occurs over time. This results in a working television or laptop screen suddenly exhibiting lines.

The solution is of course very simple, one needs to clean the contacts with a high quality electrical contact cleaner. It is best to clean the socket and the ribbon cable contacts, which will solve the fault.

One of the most common faults with laptops is that the ribbon cable connecting to the LCD panel cracks. It typically fails near the hinge area due to flexing in that region, and over time, some of the tracks on the plastic cable breaks. I have seen these types of faults on many laptops. It does not matter whether it is a Lenovo, IBM, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba, or even a MacBook Pro!

It is also possible to have a dislodged cable, which typically occurs on mishandled laptops. The plastic clip that holds the ribbon cable is very small and delicate and if the laptop receives an impact, the ribbon cable can dislodge.

This type of fault can also occur on LCD televisions; however, it tends to be on new units, where the box has received an impact during transit from the factory.

In this situation, the repair can be easy, as the cable will simply require reseating. However, there is still the labour time to consider as it can take the best part of the day to gain access to the ribbon cable.

If the laptop has a socket that provides a VGA output, then the first thing to do is to hook up another good monitor to it to see if the picture is good. If the picture on another monitor is good, then you can be sure that the video chipset and the motherboard electronics are operating properly, and it is a connection issue.

I used this same method of troubleshooting to repair an LCD television recently. Modern televisions have a video out socket, and if you feed the signal from that to another monitor, you can check for the quality of the video display. If the external monitor does not show lines, then you know for sure that it is a connection issue. Hence, this method of troubleshooting works for some of the modern televisions as well.

When half of the vertical interlace is missing showing a picture that is broken up vertically, the display appears with vertical lines. This is usually due to a cracked ribbon cable.

Generally, for laptops a replacement cable is always required due to it breaking near the hinge. I had this Dell laptop and replacing the LCD ribbon cable solved the problem. I managed to buy a replacement from Dell for a modest price £6.00. The laptop was just outside the warranty period; however, they still shipped out the cable free of charge. This is the reason why people buy Dell. In my experience Dell tend to stand by their customers and products, and their prices for replacement parts are realistic and down to earth.

Replacing a laptop ribbon cable is simple, and the top-half of the laptop, and keyboard needs removing to gain access to the socket on the motherboard side. As you can see, it flexes near the hinge area and breaks where the ribbon cable wraps around the hinge.