I can only speak from my own experience but I've had two LCDs go bad in
the same M100, and that's with not-terribly-heavy use. I would venture
to guess that it's probably a common fail point but there are plenty of
guys on the list with a lot more M100 experience than me so we'll wait
for the final verdict. I never had the problem you're describing though
of losing segments of the screen; I guess when my LCDs fail it's a 'go
big or go home' prospect or something. The entire screen just went blank
both times.
Replacing the entire LCD/PCB was no trouble at all; literally a few
screws and a couple of plugs. I really never considered trying to swap
individual components but if you do go that route I'd be interested to
hear how it goes since I've now got a couple of otherwise dead LCDs in
the project box.
Good luck!
Roger
On 09/01/2017 07:42 PM, Jim Anderson wrote:
Thought I'd toss this question out there because I haven't been able to turn up
any helpful information on my own, and I figured *somebody* on here must have
dealt with this issue before...
I've got two M100s which have partial failure in the LCD. The screen in my
'parts' machine is in really rough shape - off the top of my head I recall that
most of the top half of the screen does not show any image. The screen in the
one I use the most developed a single dead vertical column in the lower half of
the screen, near the right-hand side, and then more recently (while on a
camping trip) another single dead vertical column in the lower half of the
screen, but near the left-hand side this time.
These dead columns might not be completely dead (or it might just be crosstalk)
- if I turn the contrast wheel to full darkness and view the screen from a low
angle it looks like pixels which are supposed to be black are faintly darker
than the rest of the column, but again, this might be just crosstalk or my
imagination.
I've also seen some machines for sale online which have this problem. I'm
wondering if this is a common issue, and if there is a fix for it. My gut
instinct is that either the contact between the LCD and the display PCB is
failing, or that one (or in my case, two) of the driver ICs has a failing
output.
I'm not sure how to go about safely taking the LCD off the PCB. I'm fairly
comfortable with attempting to transplant one of the ICs from the parts
machine's display if that's a known cause of this issue.
Thoughts?
jim
