Muggins & his bargain LCD monitors

I was persuaded to buy a couple of good-looking but non-working ex-government 18-inch LCD TFT monitors for $30 each. Good price, you might say – well, read on.

These were 6-year old Acerview FP855 units and were pretty "schmick" in their day, with features that included a 50ms response time, VESA, DPMS, EPA and NUTEK 803299 standards, built-in speakers, a microphone and a USB hub. Their standard resolution is 1280 x 1024 and they originally sold for $4976 back in 2000!

I thought they were a bargain and im-mediately set about repairing them.

Both sets were dead and the switchmode power supply module in each had blown completely, although fortunately not in the same way.

Access to the power supply is fairly easy, as it’s behind a panel in the stand above the USB hub. The power supply is quite sophisticated and in fact consists of two supplies which provide +12V and +5V. One is permanently on, while the other is switched on via sync pulses or a power saving signal, or via the on/off power switch. In fact, the latter supplies +12V to a sub-power DC-DC board which then produces additional +5V, +5V FIX and 3.3V rails. The +5V (power saver) then switches on the second power supply.