I had never tried to repair electronics equipment before and thanks to this, I'm now looking at my newly repaired monitor. It had a bad Capxon caps, soldered in replacements today (first time soldering too), whole repair cost me 1 euro 15 cent. You're a hero!
I doubt it is planned obsolescence. As you can read on Wikipedia article for planned obsolescence it is a risky strategy for companies in competitive markets like LCD monitors. As consumers with a bad experience with Samsung will likely choose a competitors product. I bet the original design engineer (with pride in his design) didn't choose CapXon. But that decision was made later in the production department for the purpose to save costs. Maybe a stupid deal was made with CapXon to have them supply all the caps in certain production lines. It might be a continues conflict between management and the engineering staff for those decisions.
SE45CX It seems like the perfect choice for a company like Samsung. Samsung are the largest supplier of "Name brand" monitors in the world because they're the cheapest and have "decent quality" for the price. Dave's teardown shows exactly how well made the monitors are inside with the sole exception of the cheap caps. Someone buys a Samsung monitor, it lasts a few years and then dies, most likely, they'll buy another Samsung because they're the cheapest "known brand" like I mentioned. Another benefit to Samsung is when they sell monitors with service-contracts or warranties, if a monitor fails and it's under warranty, it's literally the work of a moment to repair it as Dave's demonstrated in the video.
SE45CX this is also what the Wikipedia article said about planned obsolescence Planned obsolescence is sometimes achieved by placing a heat-sensitive component adjacent to a component that is expected to get hot. A common example is LCD screens with heat-sensitive electrolytic capacitors placed next to power components which may be 100 °C or hotter; this heat greatly reduces the lifespan of the electrolytic capacitor.[7]
I watched this video a couple of times while waiting for my caps to come from Digikey. Performed this very same surgery on Friday to my 10 year old Acer monitor that was boot-cycling for a minute before staying on. The power board was full of bulging CapXon's. Back in business for 7$ US and an hour of my time.
Having one of these same models in the basement - it would turn on but the display took 30 minutes to become visible - and needing a spare monitor, I decided to go for the fix. I've already fixed a beautiful ViewSonic monitor where a $5 capacitor change saved $800, so charged forward. Indeed, two adjacent capacitors of 820uf, 25v, were visibly bulging at the top. These were replaced along with a 330uf 25v capacitor nearby (it looked ok but was in a heat area so replaced it proactively). The failures I saw were not quite as dramatic as Dave's dumpster treasure, but left in place this would have been their fate. The monitor now works perfectly. Thanks to Dave for showing how that plastic case comes apart. Especially helpful.
In 2001 or 2002, if I remember correctly there where caps manufactured which where wrongly calculated, these caps where used in cars, motherboards, etc. All these caps died within 1-3 years. For a moment there even was a shortage on caps. About 7 brands sold these caps. See "capacitor plague"
According to same reports, the actual root cause was not-pure-enough aluminium used to manufacture the capacitors. Some claimed that the reason would have been poor quality electrolyte but I think it was later pointed out that it wasn't the actual cause of the problem.
Im sad you fast forwarded the repair part, it's actually why I clicked on this video. Also, my theory is that they purposely picked those caps to shorten the life time of those monitors. The people who threw them out had to buy new ones right?
I wouldn't mind betting that Samsung said "hey, let's make a shit hot monitor that everyone will want", so they did. Then the marketing department said "hang on, we want it to look nice and perform well, but if they last, we'll won't sell any more monitors for the next 20 years", so the designers then replied with "Easy, we'll fix that! These caps will fail in 5! You can even put a 3 year warranty on the suckers and still make a killing". Management then promptly fell to the floor with shudders of joy vibrating through them. After changing their pants, they approved the product and here we are!
+RmFrZQ Using low ESR won't work if the connection to the switching transistor is too long, because you have to add the ESR of the connection. So of cause ESR capacitors need to be really close to those hot transistors and need to be rated for the unusually high temperature shown in the video.
John Doe So good design decision should be to use larger caps with more capacity? Caps will last longer than 2-3 years. I also very disappointed with pricing of authorized Samsung repair services, who charge half of the price of monitor to change 3 caps.
Yes I did. What I meant by that I was already quite knowledgeable in electronics before I got to formally study it. And I did so much outside of study (work and hobby), that I like to think I've learnt more useful stuff that way than through formal study.
The SyncMaster 793S 17", we're and are one of the clearest screens i've worked with. Cheap but really clear. What i liked about it and what people were saying at the time was that it lacked definition and color. But as usual as with most inexperienced users they wouldn't bother setting up the display properly. Once you do it's a beast. I still use it from time to time when i have a task that includes digital manipulation etc.
Just like my Apple Studio Display failure, blew up in 18 months, caps blown up everywhere. As I found out the powerboard was made in Korea by a company that supplies all those 'famous' Korean brands
I gotta tell you - you made me laugh out loud !! A highly trained and greatly experienced Electrical Engineer like yourself - with all of the amazing electronics tools that you have!! You have only 2 phillips screwdrivers ... and you lost one of those !! LOL !! Thanks for all of the great videos !!! ;)
This is great. I've had a broken one sitting in my office for a year or two, waiting for me to properly dispose of it. Now I have a weekend project. Thanks!
thank you for the tv good sir, found a 32 in visio tv dead on the side of the road and replaced some caps2x 10v3300uf and 1x 10v2200uf now i'm rocking a $5 tv, thank you for showing me how
Thank You very much Dave! My brother have epilepsia and it's recommended for him to use LCD monitor. Unfortunately his 22" HYUNDAI IT N220W LCD monitor wasn't working... until yesterday :D I've replaced four 680uF 25V capacitors with two 1000uF 25V and another two 680uF 25V caps. Now mine brothers LCD works perfect, so we can afford any epilepsion attacks that can be eventually caused by CRT monitor. My repair cost me nothing, because capacitors for mine replacement were taken from an old PC motherboard, so I've also spared ~200PLN (~65USD) which I would have to pay for repair in service. I'm not good in soldering, but I've managed to solve the problem :) Thank You again and greetings from Poland!
Thanks for doing this, I did a replacement like this for a DSL modem with bad caps, but was not sure what specifically to do for the replacements. This answers a lot of questions.
You're so right. I experienced this in a company I worked for. A woman who was subsequently fired, took it upon herself to "shave" money. She (without authorization) went looking for the cheapest parts. Her purchases never went through engineering authorization. These were bearings. Total junk. Thank you again Dave, for bringing the seemingly obvious to our eyes and ears.
I am staring at the exact same board on a Samsung Syncmaster. Same bulging caps. Will be trying this out and see if I can bring this year old dead monitor to life.
Last week I found a monitor sitting out with somebody's trash and I decided to take it and find out what's wrong. With a little research, I figured out a few capacitors were blown. I ordered a replacement kit and I now have a secondary monitor that I spent a total of 20$ on to fix.
Probably the best clip I've watched for several months on TH-cam. This with dodgy caps is probably common knowledge among most of your subscribers. But newsflash to me. Big thanks for passing quality knowledge on.
I do these kinds of monitor repairs as well. It helps to wire the cap further from its original position so that it doesn't get heated by the heatsink. I also always step up the rating, using a one step higher voltage is a good choice.
My friend wanted to trash his Samsung monitor because of some picture flickering and occasional refusal to turn on but luckily I managed to stop him in time. Searching YT for "how to" - few seconds. Watching EEVblog #347 - 17min37sec. Cost of few JAMICON low ESR caps - next to nothing. Dissassembly, soldering and reassembly - less than half an hour. Now I have " brand new" SyncMaster 226BW monitor - thanks a lot Dave :-)
I want to say thank you so much for these videos!!! After looking at the crapxon caps that had puked I knew I had a chance of repairing these 2 TVs. After a total of 2 hours and 6-330~25v + 2-1000~25v caps,both TVs work beautifully!! Thanks again for the inspiration and confidence!!!! BTW I used Taicon caps and the Samsung sprung to life from oblivion,the Philips was teetering on the brink with intermittent function.
I've done a ton of work on LCD monitors and allways it has been bad caps that were the issue. Made hundreds of dollars on collecting bad LCD's, repairing and selling them to people in need. :) Love to repair LCD's cause it's really easy, costs are extremely low and you make a shitload of money on it. :)
Hey Dave! A few summers ago, during an IT internship, I was given a pretty nice looking Samsung SyncMaster 226BW monitor. After watching this video, I decided to finally pop it open and take a look, and I found the exact same thing that you found. Unfortunately, I didn't have the exact same value (or even close to) caps. I just decided to then solder a few caps in series to match the capacitance on some protoboard. I got it working on the first try, and I'm enjoying it so far. Thanks for making this, and all of your other videos. Keep it up, man! (Greetings from Oklahoma)
(Sorry for my suck English) This morning have repaired a monitor LCD about this. My model is a sync master 203 and has find the elettrolitics caps crushed. Thanks David L. Jones for all!!! :D
Thanks. I was trying to fix something else on my Television (not LCD) and I thougth that this could be the problem, I had one bad cap and I change it!! Didn't fix my problem, which after I solved, but solved a problem that I had for about 2 years, the screen was always a little too red (shades of red) and now the image is perfect!! So thank you very much!!
got 4 dead samsung monitors in my office, and they all mine. thanks to this im going to open apart those monitors to see if its the same problem. if it is, then i'll probably have 4 of these monitors for spare to built a personal media room. thanks man this could save me lots of money.
First of all, just want to say thank you for all your hard work and excellent channel! I have learned a ton since subscribing awhile back, one of the best electronics channels on the web! I've made quite a few repairs directly related to videos of yours, and I can't express enough thanks for what you. Most recently, my girlfriend brought home a 19" Samsung 920BM...plugged it in, no power at all. No dis-assembly videos on the web, that I could find, so I ended up here. The monitors appeared to have very similar construction, and sure enough, they did. Was tough separating the two halves of the shell, but the insides looked to be a very similar design. Got it apart, had a look at the power board, and there was a huge scorch mark right through the PCB, right between the mains plug and the fuse. Checked continuity on the fuse, and fuse wasn't popped, strangely. So I figured if I could solder some wire directly from the mains plug right to the input side of the fuse, I might be able to get it working, as long as the scorch hole in the PCB hadn't damaged any other traces. Luckily, it appears the PCB was single layer, so I soldered in the little piece of wire from plug to input side of fuse, and sure enough, up and running perfectly, been using it since last night. Without your videos, I would never have even thought to try such a thing and probably spent $30 on a power board for the thing.
I'm glad to see this video. I've been sitting on an old HP LCD monitor for years that never powered up, and I've been wanting to find one for sale with a cracked screen or something, selling for parts only, to fix it. I'll have to pop it open and see if any of the caps are blown.
same with mine mate, dodgy caps on a Samsung SyncMaster 226bw. 6 caps were bad and as you said no need to test. Was evident they were dead. Filter cap was ok so left that in. £2 quick repair and runs perfect now. Not bad for a scrap find
I have a Princeton LCD monitor that a friend gave me that is having the exact same problem. I am going to drop by the electronics house on my way home from work and pick up 5 of the 470uF 25V caps to repair it. What surprised me is that those ViewSonic monitors are almost identical inside to my Princeton one. Great video!
ViewSonic was probably selling Princeton monitors with there own name. I had a Sylvania CRT which was actually a Princeton monitor without paying the Princeton price for it.
Did this for my television, which died a couple years back suddenly. Worked like a charm and cost me 15 bucks to fix. Pretty good for a 2K dollar television. Works to this day.
I fixed a big flat panel TV for a charity fund raiser last year. It was an expensive TV taken out by a single cap in a power supply module. Those 85C rated caps will pop every time. It costs a few cents extra for 105C rated caps, but they actually do the job.
I've fixed a couple of monitors with the same problem. A month ago, I've got an LG Flatron L246WH 24" 16:10 monitor that didn't poweron. There were two 3300uF 35v caps in parallell (6600uF) that had leaked. I replaced them with a single 6800uF 50v nichicon cap. Works like a charm now. :)
I have a TV-Monitor LCD SyncMaster 711MP that showed the same problem and thanks to this video I have been able to fix it the same way you did. Thanks for sharing :-D
I was once repairing a display module of an old CNC machine. It had intel 80-something cpu and a few other chips on it. Attaching a scope to the +5v pin gave a nice looking sawtooth waveform with peak-to-peak of about 2-3V. On the other side of the board was a closed switch mode power supply generating hv for the display. The problem was with the internal caps on the input had gone bad. It was not easy to replace them, so we just added another outside
The sad part with the capacitors is that most somewhat skilled people could fix them instead of throwing a repairable device into the trash. "Built to fail" as soon the warranty is gone. Come on people, if something is already broken, there is no harm in tearing it apart and at least check how that device is made, you can't do more harm if it's already broken beyond repair and if it isn't you can give it to your local electronics technician or try to fix it yourself. Or at least scavenge some neat parts. I love this channel, every time there is something new to learn.
***** Not necessarily true. I 100% agree on what you said about increasing people's knowledge on repairing electronics. But still, you can get zapped by a power unit's capacitor pretty easily if you just randomly tear stuff down.
I repaired my monitor the same way just recently. In all the monitors I've repaired, the symptoms were completely different and could be misleading. For example, my monitor only showed white screen (backlight) but other brand monitor needed 15 tries to turn on. I would say bad caps in this one are intentional. Build quality shows they know what they're doing, with crappy caps it's planned obsolescence. Lastly I'd like to suggest a subject for a follow-up video: safe discharging of caps. Thanks.
I had exactly the same caps blown in the exact same monitor model - coincidence? I don't think so. Also, like 5 years ago, I got 4 same Acer 17" LCDs and all of them had exactly the same problem - a cold joint on one leg of a 220-something nF cap in the CCFL socket area which led to destruction of the inverter transistors. After the repair and preventive replacement of all PSU elctrolytics, they still work like a charm, being used for 8hrs+ a day at my old school.
I have repaired about 15 Viewsonic monitors this way - replacing the capacitors. However I have noticed that anything newer than about vintage 2011 I can't unsolder anything off the boards. I have just a basic soldering iron.
I enjoyed the video, thanks. I've got a 37" Hannspree TV which failed to start up. It gave a really loud crack so I opened it up to discover the caps in the psu had split on the cross.I ordered some low ESR caps and job was a good un. I used to repair tv sets when I was still at school for a rental shop back in the 60's in my summer holidays. It's a shame so many electronic items are just thrown away when they go wrong. I bet you had a big grin after winning 2 monitors.
Yep, I fixed five LCD monitors today at work. ALL of them works after replacing the electrolytics in the SMPS. And yes, three of them were Samsung with, you guessed it, CapXon caps. Here's a picture of them and a bag of replaced caps ;-)
same happened to my old working place. was lucky enough to grab a lot before they got into the dumpster. replaced the faulty capacitors for like under a few bucks and voila, working like a charm.
Yea nice video. After watching this video i realized that the 50A 13.8V SMPS i have found in the dumpster might now be as useless as i thought!!!! I took it apart and saw two 450uF 400V caps were blown!!!!! I have replaced then with some Nippon Chemi-Con caps of the same ratings, and is started to work. Not bad for a power supply that stayed under rain for a week. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!! a lot!!!
I'm just starting to learn basic electronics and already just a few days in I've noticed that low quality caps blowing is one of the most common causes of failure, going by a bunch of videos and forum posts. In fact I've already encountered it myself because I chose to mess around with a broken old HD DVD drive I had in order to practice soldering/desoldering, and I quickly noticed that a cap was blown (which is likely what caused the drive to fail). When I think of the number of things I've thrown out over the years that might have been easily fixed it annoys me, especially when it might even be a premeditated decision on the part of the manufacturers. Not gonna be doing that anymore, there's more than enough e-waste already and I don't want my nerdy hobbies contributing loads towards it. This nerdy hobby is gonna reduce it.
Samsung bedroom TV here has almost the same board, and the same startup problems... Did not repair it yet, but this clip woke me up. New caps are now in the mail.
Got a Samsung, round same time but different model. Caps have also gone in exactly the same area. This is helping me fix mine. I have the replacement caps.
I recently revived a PC motherboard which had some bad caps. Works fine. The only problem - that board is old and not powerful enough for modern software, but for some NAS or web server it will do just fine.
Im inspired to find something to fix my experience has been mostly determining "why" things don't work - troubleshooting. But i havent the internal strength to fix them yet - lazy. Great vid!
Hi Viktor, don't know where you're writing from, but here in Chile, you can insert the plug in either mode: So, a two-pole mains switch has to be a must. I just think the UK's insistence on grounding is absolutely valid. I would say it has saved more lives over the years thanks to any any other single precaution. Also, UK plugs have fuses rated for the appliance fitted to the plug. I agree that most things today do not need "grounding"...but you take whatever precaution against shock & fire.??
Hi! Dave, this video inspired me to undertake repairing a 19" LCD monitor my brother gave me. The best part is i used Nippon Chemi-con caps from a dead XFX computer power supply he also gave me. so for a bit of my time, a 100% free monitor. Oh, three guesses what brand caps Dell used in this monitor (you only need one).
EEVblog I had no idea about electronics. Thanks to your instructions repair on LG Flatron W2242S, during important film editing session, worked like a beauty. No dead or injured. Mission successfully accomplished. Many thanks from Germany.
I have fixed quite a few LCD screens that show a common fault where they power up, give a picture and then go blank about 10ms later, or if you hold a torch up to them you can see the picture. The back-light drivers fail for the CFL, which can be simply replaced along with the caps that are paired with them which brings them back to life.
Thanks to this video I was able to revive my acer x203H that I had almost thrown away! Encouraged by your can-do attitude I open up my monitor and found similarly bulged caps in almost the exact same location. After calling around I was able to find some caps that weren't low ESR and they are working until I can get the right ones in the mail. Thanks for the video! Liked, favorited, subscribed :D
Did this with the eMac, both the power supply and the main board had bad caps and somehow this thing still worked and booted up prior to replacing all caps with good quality Panasonic or japan built caps. However once the caps had been replaced I noticed a boost of speed and also when playing music at top volume the screen no longer shook and glitched. Please use care if your going to open your eMac there is VERY hazardous voltage stored in there for the monitor. Even after unpluging...
I am so excited dave! I found a samsung TV in the trash last night. it turns on but black screen with back light. I waiting to open it up to check the caps!
Funny, did this exact same replacement procedure on a friends samsung monitor a week or 2 ago. Replaced 5x820uF 25V caps :p cost 2-3 euroes total overnight ordered from farnell :) and it worked.
Awesome video! I've repaired about 15 monitors, all from bad caps. If the manufacturers would use better caps to begin with these would last at least twice as long. I suspect they use crap caps to A) save a few cents per monitor and B) planned obsolescence so we have to buy more.
I've done this fix to so many items. My Samsung laser printer was dumpster sourced. It turned on but whined and didn't actually complete the power-up sequence. Of course, a dodgy cap in the power supply was at fault. Fixed that with a cap from a VCR I also found and I have a free laser printer. $25 for the toner on ebay.
Nice video, Dave. I've myself revived many screens bought for nothing or simply got for free by replacing some caps. It's especially interesting for screens that have reputably good panels (it's the case for some SyncMaster series, regardless of the electronics that drive it) or formats that are barely supported by manufacturers today (like 16/10 screens. Even today you'd be hard-pressed to find better than those 24" 16/10 Iiyama displays).
I've fixed a hundred of these things. Swap out the electrolytics and good as new! The bad ones are usually swollen but as cheap as they are, I change them all out.
Well thanks guys, Just went through the same process with an LG monitor and used the same Jaycar caps in the power supply. Looks from the comments I may be doing the job again in a few months.
Hi thank you so much for uploading this! My Flatron L192WS has the exact same problem! I have no experience with electronics but you make this very clear. I want to fix the monitor myself but I'm worried about Capacitor discharge safety :( - is there anyway for me to be 100% sure that all the charge is dispelled? First time dealing with something like this. Thanks!
Check it with a multimeter, just put your multimeter on volts and probe the two solder joints of the capacitor on the back of the PCB. In the unlikely case that you get a reading more than millivolts, put a 1k resistor across the two capacitor leads to drain it down in a controlled manner. Flatscreen monitors don't use extremely high voltages like the old CRT televisions did.
When you short circuit the terminals of a capacitor with a screwdriver, you're trying to reduce its voltage to 0 instantly, which would require a very large electric current, thus generating a lot of heat. To discharge it slowly, you can just connect a resistor to the terminals and monitor it with a voltmeter. In fact, the voltmeter itself can be used for that purpose (if it's analog), but it would take really long to discharge, as they have a really high resistance.
I've had a SyncMaster 920n since 2007 and that's what I currently use (having had it replaced in 2009 because it failed). Scary to know it might fail at any time though.
That's really funny because I literally only started learning basic electronics this week and the very first broken device I opened for practice ended up having a leaking capacitor, which was almost certainly what made it die. Although I have since googled the device and found that a blown cap was the single most common point of failure (the only one I could find mention of online).
today i replaced a cap on a old medion monitor, because it had such horrible coil whining it turned out that the cap was responsible for smoothing the voltage for the high voltage transformer witch powers the cold cathode backlight now the squeaking is finally gone, i wish i would have known that 4 years earlier ...
In this case the warning signs were for the backlight drivers, which put out high voltage while running. The only dangerous cap here (after the monitor being unplugged) is the large 450V type near the AC input. You can discharge it by connecting a resistor in the order of 10k accross it's legs. If the board is unplugged, touching a single wire should be safe. Without ground reference there's no path for a current to flow.
I had a Samsung 226BW with the exact same power supply board in it. In my case the monitor had problems turning on. I replaced the Caps and its working just fine. This was last october an its running about 8 hours per day without any issues. I too haven't bothered replacing the input cap. The only difference with my board was, that at the top corner there are 3 820µF caps. Maybe thats why my monitor didn't fail completely. I replaced them all with Panasonic FC caps.
I usually put in smaller caps in parallel with ugly bodge wires, so I can fix pretty much all monitors with a supply of 470uF 35V caps. The result seems to survive the ripple current better and fits easily in the case, unlike trying to shoe-horn in higher-quality ones (with better ripple current handling) of the original rating which are always bigger than the ones that failed (no free lunch)
Whoops, I meant solid polymer capacitors. I'd like to see more of those in electronics! Very tired of my recent purchases having the point of failure at the cheap electrolytic ones. I'm sure they just cost pennies more. By the way, great videos! I'm gonna register at your forum. Keep up the good work!
One huge hurdle in the way of replacing capacitors is finding the correct capacitor in the first place. I was going to replace some blown caps on a motherboard but when I got the new caps from Digikey they were freaking huge and return shipping cost as much as they did to begin with! Dang, I did the best I could though.
It is soldered to the board - the connector just has both PCB pins and wire hooks. I don't know why it has both, but if you look a bit latter in the video you can see the back side of the board where the IEC connector is attached and there is clearly a big ground plane with a big connector pin sticking out.
I have an 18" 4:3 Hitachi monitor that alive for over 10 years now. Hitachi says in the user manual to replace the power supply after three years and yet its still working like a charm. So where I'm going with this is this. In the race to produce competitively priced monitors I would guess that sometimes manufacturers have to accept a supplier who probably wouldn't have been their first choice simply because their offerings are cheaper yet meet their requirements.
Ah yes. I still have a Syncmaster sitting near the repair bench. I recapped it a year ago expecting as easy fix like this but no such luck. It works until it gets warm then the backlight drops out. One of these days I need to take it back apart to look at the solder joints and high voltage transformer.
In the US, Mouser, Digi-key, Allied, and Newark all come to mind. Be prepared for a steep learning curve when searching, though, as they carry millions of parts, and hundreds of thousands that are fairly similar. It can be overwhelming at first.
I think it's because the way the electrolytic caps seem to fail is by going open circuit rather then shorting, especially so when the electrolyte in them dries out. A lot of Samsung made flat screens had a habit of using caps that were of too low of a voltage rating, as well as using a cheap brand of cap.
I've lost count of the number of these I've fixed like this over the years. I guess the bean-counters will be happy as long as the cheap caps last longer than the warranty, particularly if it means the customer then goes out and buys a new monitor.
I had never tried to repair electronics equipment before and thanks to this, I'm now looking at my newly repaired monitor. It had a bad Capxon caps, soldered in replacements today (first time soldering too), whole repair cost me 1 euro 15 cent. You're a hero!
Dodgy caps is the perfect choice for planned obsolescense.
CapXon. Being the base of crappy electronic products since 1990
Company's hate people who replace caps
I doubt it is planned obsolescence. As you can read on Wikipedia article for planned obsolescence it is a risky strategy for companies in competitive markets like LCD monitors. As consumers with a bad experience with Samsung will likely choose a competitors product. I bet the original design engineer (with pride in his design) didn't choose CapXon. But that decision was made later in the production department for the purpose to save costs. Maybe a stupid deal was made with CapXon to have them supply all the caps in certain production lines. It might be a continues conflict between management and the engineering staff for those decisions.
SE45CX It seems like the perfect choice for a company like Samsung. Samsung are the largest supplier of "Name brand" monitors in the world because they're the cheapest and have "decent quality" for the price. Dave's teardown shows exactly how well made the monitors are inside with the sole exception of the cheap caps.
Someone buys a Samsung monitor, it lasts a few years and then dies, most likely, they'll buy another Samsung because they're the cheapest "known brand" like I mentioned.
Another benefit to Samsung is when they sell monitors with service-contracts or warranties, if a monitor fails and it's under warranty, it's literally the work of a moment to repair it as Dave's demonstrated in the video.
SE45CX this is also what the Wikipedia article said about planned obsolescence Planned obsolescence is sometimes achieved by placing a heat-sensitive component adjacent to a component that is expected to get hot. A common example is LCD screens with heat-sensitive electrolytic capacitors placed next to power components which may be 100 °C or hotter; this heat greatly reduces the lifespan of the electrolytic capacitor.[7]
I watched this video a couple of times while waiting for my caps to come from Digikey. Performed this very same surgery on Friday to my 10 year old Acer monitor that was boot-cycling for a minute before staying on. The power board was full of bulging CapXon's. Back in business for 7$ US and an hour of my time.
Having one of these same models in the basement - it would turn on but the display took 30 minutes to become visible - and needing a spare monitor, I decided to go for the fix. I've already fixed a beautiful ViewSonic monitor where a $5 capacitor change saved $800, so charged forward.
Indeed, two adjacent capacitors of 820uf, 25v, were visibly bulging at the top. These were replaced along with a 330uf 25v capacitor nearby (it looked ok but was in a heat area so replaced it proactively). The failures I saw were not quite as dramatic as Dave's dumpster treasure, but left in place this would have been their fate.
The monitor now works perfectly.
Thanks to Dave for showing how that plastic case comes apart. Especially helpful.
In 2001 or 2002, if I remember correctly there where caps manufactured which where wrongly calculated, these caps where used in cars, motherboards, etc. All these caps died within 1-3 years. For a moment there even was a shortage on caps. About 7 brands sold these caps. See "capacitor plague"
According to same reports, the actual root cause was not-pure-enough aluminium used to manufacture the capacitors. Some claimed that the reason would have been poor quality electrolyte but I think it was later pointed out that it wasn't the actual cause of the problem.
Im sad you fast forwarded the repair part, it's actually why I clicked on this video.
Also, my theory is that they purposely picked those caps to shorten the life time of those monitors. The people who threw them out had to buy new ones right?
I wouldn't mind betting that Samsung said "hey, let's make a shit hot monitor that everyone will want", so they did. Then the marketing department said "hang on, we want it to look nice and perform well, but if they last, we'll won't sell any more monitors for the next 20 years", so the designers then replied with "Easy, we'll fix that! These caps will fail in 5! You can even put a 3 year warranty on the suckers and still make a killing". Management then promptly fell to the floor with shudders of joy vibrating through them. After changing their pants, they approved the product and here we are!
+Thomas Fowler That's what a lot of manufacturers do nowadays, sadly.
+Thomas Fowler I know! They place capacitors very close to hot transistors on purpose!
+RmFrZQ Using low ESR won't work if the connection to the switching transistor is too long, because you have to add the ESR of the connection. So of cause ESR capacitors need to be really close to those hot transistors and need to be rated for the unusually high temperature shown in the video.
John Doe
So good design decision should be to use larger caps with more capacity? Caps will last longer than 2-3 years. I also very disappointed with pricing of authorized Samsung repair services, who charge half of the price of monitor to change 3 caps.
Today, I just spent $2 for replaced caps and labor and yes my syncmaster is now back online. Truly your video is worth watching. Ty Sir
Yes I did. What I meant by that I was already quite knowledgeable in electronics before I got to formally study it. And I did so much outside of study (work and hobby), that I like to think I've learnt more useful stuff that way than through formal study.
The SyncMaster 793S 17", we're and are one of the clearest screens i've worked with. Cheap but really clear. What i liked about it and what people were saying at the time was that it lacked definition and color. But as usual as with most inexperienced users they wouldn't bother setting up the display properly. Once you do it's a beast. I still use it from time to time when i have a task that includes digital manipulation etc.
Just like my Apple Studio Display failure, blew up in 18 months, caps blown up everywhere. As I found out the powerboard was made in Korea by a company that supplies all those 'famous' Korean brands
I gotta tell you - you made me laugh out loud !! A highly trained and greatly experienced Electrical Engineer like yourself - with all of the amazing electronics tools that you have!! You have only 2 phillips screwdrivers ... and you lost one of those !! LOL !! Thanks for all of the great videos !!! ;)
This is great. I've had a broken one sitting in my office for a year or two, waiting for me to properly dispose of it. Now I have a weekend project. Thanks!
thank you for the tv good sir, found a 32 in visio tv dead on the side of the road and replaced some caps2x 10v3300uf and 1x 10v2200uf now i'm rocking a $5 tv, thank you for showing me how
Thank You very much Dave! My brother have epilepsia and it's recommended for him to use LCD monitor. Unfortunately his 22" HYUNDAI IT N220W LCD monitor wasn't working... until yesterday :D I've replaced four 680uF 25V capacitors with two 1000uF 25V and another two 680uF 25V caps. Now mine brothers LCD works perfect, so we can afford any epilepsion attacks that can be eventually caused by CRT monitor. My repair cost me nothing, because capacitors for mine replacement were taken from an old PC motherboard, so I've also spared ~200PLN (~65USD) which I would have to pay for repair in service. I'm not good in soldering, but I've managed to solve the problem :) Thank You again and greetings from Poland!
Thanks for doing this, I did a replacement like this for a DSL modem with bad caps, but was not sure what specifically to do for the replacements. This answers a lot of questions.
You're so right. I experienced this in a company I worked for. A woman who was subsequently fired, took it upon herself to "shave" money. She (without authorization) went looking for the cheapest parts. Her purchases never went through engineering authorization. These were bearings. Total junk. Thank you again Dave, for bringing the seemingly obvious to our eyes and ears.
I am staring at the exact same board on a Samsung Syncmaster. Same
bulging caps. Will be trying this out and see if I can bring this year
old dead monitor to life.
Yep, it's working now. Thanks for the tip.
Last week I found a monitor sitting out with somebody's trash and I decided to take it and find out what's wrong. With a little research, I figured out a few capacitors were blown. I ordered a replacement kit and I now have a secondary monitor that I spent a total of 20$ on to fix.
Probably the best clip I've watched for several months on TH-cam. This with dodgy caps is probably common knowledge among most of your subscribers. But newsflash to me. Big thanks for passing quality knowledge on.
I do these kinds of monitor repairs as well. It helps to wire the cap further from its original position so that it doesn't get heated by the heatsink. I also always step up the rating, using a one step higher voltage is a good choice.
Great stuff well done. Fender do the same thing with their guitar amplifiers. Cheap IC caps.
Content starts at 04:01
Great video, full of valuable insights. Thank you!
My friend wanted to trash his Samsung monitor because of some picture flickering and occasional refusal to turn on but luckily I managed to stop him in time. Searching YT for "how to" - few seconds. Watching EEVblog #347 - 17min37sec. Cost of few JAMICON low ESR caps - next to nothing. Dissassembly, soldering and reassembly - less than half an hour. Now I have " brand new" SyncMaster 226BW monitor - thanks a lot Dave :-)
I want to say thank you so much for these videos!!! After looking at the crapxon caps that had puked I knew I had a chance of repairing these 2 TVs. After a total of 2 hours and 6-330~25v + 2-1000~25v caps,both TVs work beautifully!! Thanks again for the inspiration and confidence!!!! BTW I used Taicon caps and the Samsung sprung to life from oblivion,the Philips was teetering on the brink with intermittent function.
I've done a ton of work on LCD monitors and allways it has been bad caps that were the issue. Made hundreds of dollars on collecting bad LCD's, repairing and selling them to people in need. :)
Love to repair LCD's cause it's really easy, costs are extremely low and you make a shitload of money on it. :)
How does Dave not have an assortment of all the necessary caps from reliable brands on hand already?
Hey Dave! A few summers ago, during an IT internship, I was given a pretty nice looking Samsung SyncMaster 226BW monitor. After watching this video, I decided to finally pop it open and take a look, and I found the exact same thing that you found. Unfortunately, I didn't have the exact same value (or even close to) caps. I just decided to then solder a few caps in series to match the capacitance on some protoboard. I got it working on the first try, and I'm enjoying it so far. Thanks for making this, and all of your other videos. Keep it up, man! (Greetings from Oklahoma)
(Sorry for my suck English) This morning have repaired a monitor LCD about this. My model is a sync master 203 and has find the elettrolitics caps crushed. Thanks David L. Jones for all!!! :D
Thanks.
I was trying to fix something else on my Television (not LCD) and I thougth that this could be the problem, I had one bad cap and I change it!! Didn't fix my problem, which after I solved, but solved a problem that I had for about 2 years, the screen was always a little too red (shades of red) and now the image is perfect!!
So thank you very much!!
got 4 dead samsung monitors in my office, and they all mine. thanks to this im going to open apart those monitors to see if its the same problem. if it is, then i'll probably have 4 of these monitors for spare to built a personal media room. thanks man this could save me lots of money.
First of all, just want to say thank you for all your hard work and excellent channel! I have learned a ton since subscribing awhile back, one of the best electronics channels on the web! I've made quite a few repairs directly related to videos of yours, and I can't express enough thanks for what you. Most recently, my girlfriend brought home a 19" Samsung 920BM...plugged it in, no power at all. No dis-assembly videos on the web, that I could find, so I ended up here. The monitors appeared to have very similar construction, and sure enough, they did. Was tough separating the two halves of the shell, but the insides looked to be a very similar design. Got it apart, had a look at the power board, and there was a huge scorch mark right through the PCB, right between the mains plug and the fuse. Checked continuity on the fuse, and fuse wasn't popped, strangely. So I figured if I could solder some wire directly from the mains plug right to the input side of the fuse, I might be able to get it working, as long as the scorch hole in the PCB hadn't damaged any other traces. Luckily, it appears the PCB was single layer, so I soldered in the little piece of wire from plug to input side of fuse, and sure enough, up and running perfectly, been using it since last night. Without your videos, I would never have even thought to try such a thing and probably spent $30 on a power board for the thing.
I'm glad to see this video. I've been sitting on an old HP LCD monitor for years that never powered up, and I've been wanting to find one for sale with a cracked screen or something, selling for parts only, to fix it. I'll have to pop it open and see if any of the caps are blown.
same with mine mate, dodgy caps on a Samsung SyncMaster 226bw. 6 caps were bad and as you said no need to test. Was evident they were dead. Filter cap was ok so left that in. £2 quick repair and runs perfect now. Not bad for a scrap find
I have a Princeton LCD monitor that a friend gave me that is having the exact same problem. I am going to drop by the electronics house on my way home from work and pick up 5 of the 470uF 25V caps to repair it. What surprised me is that those ViewSonic monitors are almost identical inside to my Princeton one. Great video!
ViewSonic was probably selling Princeton monitors with there own name. I had a Sylvania CRT which was actually a Princeton monitor without paying the Princeton price for it.
Did this for my television, which died a couple years back suddenly. Worked like a charm and cost me 15 bucks to fix. Pretty good for a 2K dollar television. Works to this day.
I fixed a big flat panel TV for a charity fund raiser last year. It was an expensive TV taken out by a single cap in a power supply module. Those 85C rated caps will pop every time. It costs a few cents extra for 105C rated caps, but they actually do the job.
Did this with my monitor not long back. Found the right caps on another PCB too, cost me nothing to fix it and saved me some money.
Being from the US it was fun to just listen to the accent while following along. Thanks for this.
I've fixed a couple of monitors with the same problem. A month ago, I've got an LG Flatron L246WH 24" 16:10 monitor that didn't poweron. There were two 3300uF 35v caps in parallell (6600uF) that had leaked. I replaced them with a single 6800uF 50v nichicon cap. Works like a charm now. :)
I have a TV-Monitor LCD SyncMaster 711MP that showed the same problem and thanks to this video I have been able to fix it the same way you did. Thanks for sharing :-D
I was once repairing a display module of an old CNC machine. It had intel 80-something cpu and a few other chips on it. Attaching a scope to the +5v pin gave a nice looking sawtooth waveform with peak-to-peak of about 2-3V. On the other side of the board was a closed switch mode power supply generating hv for the display. The problem was with the internal caps on the input had gone bad. It was not easy to replace them, so we just added another outside
The sad part with the capacitors is that most somewhat skilled people could fix them instead of throwing a repairable device into the trash. "Built to fail" as soon the warranty is gone.
Come on people, if something is already broken, there is no harm in tearing it apart and at least check how that device is made, you can't do more harm if it's already broken beyond repair and if it isn't you can give it to your local electronics technician or try to fix it yourself. Or at least scavenge some neat parts.
I love this channel, every time there is something new to learn.
***** Not necessarily true. I 100% agree on what you said about increasing people's knowledge on repairing electronics. But still, you can get zapped by a power unit's capacitor pretty easily if you just randomly tear stuff down.
I repaired my monitor the same way just recently. In all the monitors I've repaired, the symptoms were completely different and could be misleading. For example, my monitor only showed white screen (backlight) but other brand monitor needed 15 tries to turn on.
I would say bad caps in this one are intentional. Build quality shows they know what they're doing, with crappy caps it's planned obsolescence.
Lastly I'd like to suggest a subject for a follow-up video: safe discharging of caps.
Thanks.
I had exactly the same caps blown in the exact same monitor model - coincidence? I don't think so. Also, like 5 years ago, I got 4 same Acer 17" LCDs and all of them had exactly the same problem - a cold joint on one leg of a 220-something nF cap in the CCFL socket area which led to destruction of the inverter transistors. After the repair and preventive replacement of all PSU elctrolytics, they still work like a charm, being used for 8hrs+ a day at my old school.
Even though the video is pretty old it has been very useful for me nevertheless, I successfully repaired my Samsung monitor. Tank you a lot!
I have repaired about 15 Viewsonic monitors this way - replacing the capacitors. However I have noticed that anything newer than about vintage 2011 I can't unsolder anything off the boards. I have just a basic soldering iron.
I enjoyed the video, thanks. I've got a 37" Hannspree TV which failed to start up. It gave a really loud crack so I opened it up to discover the caps in the psu had split on the cross.I ordered some low ESR caps and job was a good un. I used to repair tv sets when I was still at school for a rental shop back in the 60's in my summer holidays. It's a shame so many electronic items are just thrown away when they go wrong. I bet you had a big grin after winning 2 monitors.
Yep, I fixed five LCD monitors today at work. ALL of them works after replacing the electrolytics in the SMPS. And yes, three of them were Samsung with, you guessed it, CapXon caps. Here's a picture of them and a bag of replaced caps ;-)
You are the BEST, Dave! I love your voice, and how you explore and explain so much. Your expertise is inspiring! Thank you for your work!!!
same happened to my old working place. was lucky enough to grab a lot before they got into the dumpster. replaced the faulty capacitors for like under a few bucks and voila, working like a charm.
The capacitors in my Technika TV bulged as well, only took £1.40 to replace them, instead of the £20 for the new board, or £200 for the new TV.
Yea nice video. After watching this video i realized that the 50A 13.8V SMPS i have found in the dumpster might now be as useless as i thought!!!!
I took it apart and saw two 450uF 400V caps were blown!!!!! I have replaced then with some Nippon Chemi-Con caps of the same ratings, and is started to work. Not bad for a power supply that stayed under rain for a week. Thanks!!!!!!!!!!! a lot!!!
IT'S ALIVE......Thank you. My Daughter (16) made her first electronic repair!
I'm just starting to learn basic electronics and already just a few days in I've noticed that low quality caps blowing is one of the most common causes of failure, going by a bunch of videos and forum posts.
In fact I've already encountered it myself because I chose to mess around with a broken old HD DVD drive I had in order to practice soldering/desoldering, and I quickly noticed that a cap was blown (which is likely what caused the drive to fail).
When I think of the number of things I've thrown out over the years that might have been easily fixed it annoys me, especially when it might even be a premeditated decision on the part of the manufacturers. Not gonna be doing that anymore, there's more than enough e-waste already and I don't want my nerdy hobbies contributing loads towards it. This nerdy hobby is gonna reduce it.
Do they use cheap capacitor to decrease monitor life?
Planned obsolescence is definitely a think as is minimal unit cost.
Yes.
S Gr
Samsung bedroom TV here has almost the same board, and the same startup problems... Did not repair it yet, but this clip woke me up. New caps are now in the mail.
Got a Samsung, round same time but different model. Caps have also gone in exactly the same area. This is helping me fix mine. I have the replacement caps.
Followed your video, replaced the caps. Monitor works great now. Thanks!
Thanks Dave, I fixed myself 2 new monitors at uni today after seeing this blog!
I recently revived a PC motherboard which had some bad caps. Works fine. The only problem - that board is old and not powerful enough for modern software, but for some NAS or web server it will do just fine.
Im inspired to find something to fix my experience has been mostly determining "why" things don't work - troubleshooting. But i havent the internal strength to fix them yet - lazy. Great vid!
Hi Viktor, don't know where you're writing from, but here in Chile, you can insert the plug in either mode: So, a two-pole mains switch has to be a must. I just think the UK's insistence on grounding is absolutely valid. I would say it has saved more lives over the years thanks to any any other single precaution. Also, UK plugs have fuses rated for the appliance fitted to the plug. I agree that most things today do not need "grounding"...but you take whatever precaution against shock & fire.??
Hi! Dave, this video inspired me to undertake repairing a 19" LCD monitor my brother gave me. The best part is i used Nippon Chemi-con caps from a dead XFX computer power supply he also gave me. so for a bit of my time, a 100% free monitor. Oh, three guesses what brand caps Dell used in this monitor (you only need one).
Skwisgar2322 Nice work!
EEVblog lol you should have said built like a brick shit house
EEVblog I had no idea about electronics. Thanks to your instructions repair on LG Flatron W2242S, during important film editing session, worked like a beauty.
No dead or injured. Mission successfully accomplished.
Many thanks from Germany.
The Kaiser Oh dear I have the W2243S, mine keeps squealing on booting - could this be capacitors too?
Magic Look at them and if some of them are bulgy, replace them.
I have fixed quite a few LCD screens that show a common fault where they power up, give a picture and then go blank about 10ms later, or if you hold a torch up to them you can see the picture. The back-light drivers fail for the CFL, which can be simply replaced along with the caps that are paired with them which brings them back to life.
Thanks to this video I was able to revive my acer x203H that I had almost thrown away! Encouraged by your can-do attitude I open up my monitor and found similarly bulged caps in almost the exact same location. After calling around I was able to find some caps that weren't low ESR and they are working until I can get the right ones in the mail. Thanks for the video! Liked, favorited, subscribed :D
Hi Dave, I have these monitors at work. When they go pop from now on I'll open 'em up and check this out - thanks!
Did this with the eMac, both the power supply and the main board had bad caps and somehow this thing still worked and booted up prior to replacing all caps with good quality Panasonic or japan built caps. However once the caps had been replaced I noticed a boost of speed and also when playing music at top volume the screen no longer shook and glitched. Please use care if your going to open your eMac there is VERY hazardous voltage stored in there for the monitor. Even after unpluging...
I am so excited dave! I found a samsung TV in the trash last night. it turns on but black screen with back light. I waiting to open it up to check the caps!
An oldie but goodie! I'm going to work on one next week. Thanks!
Funny, did this exact same replacement procedure on a friends samsung monitor a week or 2 ago.
Replaced 5x820uF 25V caps :p cost 2-3 euroes total overnight ordered from farnell :) and it worked.
Awesome video! I've repaired about 15 monitors, all from bad caps. If the manufacturers would use better caps to begin with these would last at least twice as long. I suspect they use crap caps to A) save a few cents per monitor and B) planned obsolescence so we have to buy more.
I've done this fix to so many items. My Samsung laser printer was dumpster sourced. It turned on but whined and didn't actually complete the power-up sequence. Of course, a dodgy cap in the power supply was at fault. Fixed that with a cap from a VCR I also found and I have a free laser printer. $25 for the toner on ebay.
CapXcons were considered High end before the "incident" from what I heard.
Nice video, Dave. I've myself revived many screens bought for nothing or simply got for free by replacing some caps. It's especially interesting for screens that have reputably good panels (it's the case for some SyncMaster series, regardless of the electronics that drive it) or formats that are barely supported by manufacturers today (like 16/10 screens. Even today you'd be hard-pressed to find better than those 24" 16/10 Iiyama displays).
Those caps might be dodgy but those are made by the Samsung standard manufacturer: CapXon and they still use them everywhere like in their chargers
I've fixed a hundred of these things. Swap out the electrolytics and good as new! The bad ones are usually swollen but as cheap as they are, I change them all out.
Did the same with a 214T, but I just scrounged some caps from a dead (physically abused) stereo. Total cost to me = nada :) Still working 4 months on.
Well thanks guys, Just went through the same process with an LG monitor and used the same Jaycar caps in the power supply. Looks from the comments I may be doing the job again in a few months.
Hi thank you so much for uploading this! My Flatron L192WS has the exact same problem! I have no experience with electronics but you make this very clear. I want to fix the monitor myself but I'm worried about Capacitor discharge safety :( - is there anyway for me to be 100% sure that all the charge is dispelled? First time dealing with something like this. Thanks!
Check it with a multimeter, just put your multimeter on volts and probe the two solder joints of the capacitor on the back of the PCB. In the unlikely case that you get a reading more than millivolts, put a 1k resistor across the two capacitor leads to drain it down in a controlled manner. Flatscreen monitors don't use extremely high voltages like the old CRT televisions did.
When you short circuit the terminals of a capacitor with a screwdriver, you're trying to reduce its voltage to 0 instantly, which would require a very large electric current, thus generating a lot of heat. To discharge it slowly, you can just connect a resistor to the terminals and monitor it with a voltmeter. In fact, the voltmeter itself can be used for that purpose (if it's analog), but it would take really long to discharge, as they have a really high resistance.
I've had a SyncMaster 920n since 2007 and that's what I currently use (having had it replaced in 2009 because it failed). Scary to know it might fail at any time though.
In all the broiken electronics I have opened, I never seen a bulging cap nor a leaking. That is my unicorn.
That's really funny because I literally only started learning basic electronics this week and the very first broken device I opened for practice ended up having a leaking capacitor, which was almost certainly what made it die. Although I have since googled the device and found that a blown cap was the single most common point of failure (the only one I could find mention of online).
today i replaced a cap on a old medion monitor, because it had such horrible coil whining
it turned out that the cap was responsible for smoothing the voltage for the high voltage transformer witch powers the cold cathode backlight
now the squeaking is finally gone, i wish i would have known that 4 years earlier ...
In this case the warning signs were for the backlight drivers, which put out high voltage while running. The only dangerous cap here (after the monitor being unplugged) is the large 450V type near the AC input. You can discharge it by connecting a resistor in the order of 10k accross it's legs. If the board is unplugged, touching a single wire should be safe. Without ground reference there's no path for a current to flow.
Great work, Dave. Glad to see you save good stuff from the dump.
I had a Samsung 226BW with the exact same power supply board in it. In my case the monitor had problems turning on. I replaced the Caps and its working just fine.
This was last october an its running about 8 hours per day without any issues. I too haven't bothered replacing the input cap. The only difference with my board was, that at the top corner there are 3 820µF caps. Maybe thats why my monitor didn't fail completely. I replaced them all with Panasonic FC caps.
I usually put in smaller caps in parallel with ugly bodge wires, so I can fix pretty much all monitors with a supply of 470uF 35V caps. The result seems to survive the ripple current better and fits easily in the case, unlike trying to shoe-horn in higher-quality ones (with better ripple current handling) of the original rating which are always bigger than the ones that failed (no free lunch)
Whoops, I meant solid polymer capacitors. I'd like to see more of those in electronics! Very tired of my recent purchases having the point of failure at the cheap electrolytic ones. I'm sure they just cost pennies more.
By the way, great videos! I'm gonna register at your forum. Keep up the good work!
One huge hurdle in the way of replacing capacitors is finding the correct capacitor in the first place. I was going to replace some blown caps on a motherboard but when I got the new caps from Digikey they were freaking huge and return shipping cost as much as they did to begin with! Dang, I did the best I could though.
It is soldered to the board - the connector just has both PCB pins and wire hooks. I don't know why it has both, but if you look a bit latter in the video you can see the back side of the board where the IEC connector is attached and there is clearly a big ground plane with a big connector pin sticking out.
Thank you, Dave. New set of Panasonic ESD caps on order; I'll see if I can get my wife's Hannspree going again.
Internal heating due to the ESR, and external heating from the heatsinks.
Amazing! Made a tutorial for this not too long ago and just further verifies that I did it right attention to ESR! Great stuff mate!
I have an 18" 4:3 Hitachi monitor that alive for over 10 years now. Hitachi says in the user manual to replace the power supply after three years and yet its still working like a charm. So where I'm going with this is this. In the race to produce competitively priced monitors I would guess that sometimes manufacturers have to accept a supplier who probably wouldn't have been their first choice simply because their offerings are cheaper yet meet their requirements.
Ah yes. I still have a Syncmaster sitting near the repair bench. I recapped it a year ago expecting as easy fix like this but no such luck. It works until it gets warm then the backlight drops out.
One of these days I need to take it back apart to look at the solder joints and high voltage transformer.
In the US, Mouser, Digi-key, Allied, and Newark all come to mind. Be prepared for a steep learning curve when searching, though, as they carry millions of parts, and hundreds of thousands that are fairly similar. It can be overwhelming at first.
I think it's because the way the electrolytic caps seem to fail is by going open circuit rather then shorting, especially so when the electrolyte in them dries out. A lot of Samsung made flat screens had a habit of using caps that were of too low of a voltage rating, as well as using a cheap brand of cap.
Love jaycar for the "get it done now!" aspect!
I've lost count of the number of these I've fixed like this over the years. I guess the bean-counters will be happy as long as the cheap caps last longer than the warranty, particularly if it means the customer then goes out and buys a new monitor.