Backlight?

[hagavra]

A peach colored light has appeared on the screen of my R50 and a friend told me the backlight was dying. He said I should not try to get it fixed but just buy a new laptop. Is he correct? I am not an expert.
Thanks,
Steve

[dclee391]

LCD screens have a tiny fluorescent lamp to light up the screen and your friend is right about the dying lamp(CCFL) but may not be right about buying a new laptop.

If you can handle screw drivers and solder gun, you can buy fluorescent lamp, solder gun, etc and DIY - change the lamp to bring a new life to your laptop screen.

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinkpads.com (belated one to dclee391)!

A pinkish / reddish tint to the light coming from the LCD panel is indeed a sign of a failing backlight (CCFL). dclee391 is correct by saying that it is possible to replace the lamp (instead of the entire laptop) to fix the issue. The advice from your friend about buying a new laptop is probably a cost-time-risk-benefit analysis; it might cost you some money and time to fix the screen but you'll still be using a system that's several generations back on the performance scale.

If you are satisfied with the capabilities of the R50, then it can cost around $15 for a replacement CCFL. This is the cheapest repair but it can also lead to a more expensive one if things go wrong. You have to take the LCD panel apart in order to replace the CCFL. If not done carefully, you could end up with a newly-bright screen that has defects to the image; stuck pixels or columns/rows can occur. You may even embed dust or hair into the panel while it's disassembled.

The next-best solution would be to buy a complete lid assembly (LCD panel, ribbon cable, inverter, lid, hinges, etc.) and swap out the old with the new. This requires a little more work to take the system apart (separating the lid from the base vs. just removing the LCD panel from the lid). Of course taking this route is more expensive and assuming you buy it off of eBay or such, you'll probably have no idea what the panel looks like until you attach it to your system. Also, given that you're buying a used LCD panel, there's some chance that the CCFL in that panel could go bad.

Another alternative is to replace just the panel. It's usually cheaper than swapping the entire lid assembly but there's some (small) potential for damage to the panel when it's shipped by itself (instead of being partially protected when in the lid) and then when it's being installed.

Finally, if your R50 is a 15" XGA model, then it's possible to upgrade the panel and ribbon cable to an SXGA+, so that might be something to consider.

ref: http://www.lcdparts.net/CCFL.aspx

[Neil]

Something else to consider is that sometimes these will still be usable for a long time even though the ccfl is slowing dying. I'm writing on a T41P right now that shows a pronounced pink tint on startup, but by the time the IBM splash is gone, so is the pink tint. By the time the desktop loads, it's looking a good as ever. And, it's been like this for about four months now. I'm going to continue using it just to see how long it takes for the lamp to completely go out.

[rkawakami]

An SXGA+ T23 that I used with a pink display almost every workday lasted about three and a half years before the backlight finally gave out. The display came to me that way and over that time, only dimmed a little bit before going pffft.

ref: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 53#p573153