Hi,

I have an old CRT monitor, Packard Bell 17in. the monitor screen is dim gradually and finally hardly seen any picture or text. someone said that was caused by the ceramic capacitor on Video/RGB Block. so i checked it and found a strange component (red circled) beside the ceramic capacitor. here is the picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/57773390@N05/5319448966/.

for more (the ceramic capacitor was removed).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57773390@N05/5319447150/
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/57773390@N05/5318845419/

the component look like bulge. on the body it is printed 1 KV HD. On the PCB it is printed Z 952.
I dont know what kind of the component is that.
sorry my bad english

 

Maybe a high voltage ceramic capacitor?

 

Probably just a simple 0.1 uf @ 1KV cap but I doubt that's your problem.

Sad that you're on the other end of the world, people are throwing away perfectly good 19" monitors over here by the boatload as they convert over to LCDs. Seems there's a lot of organizations always carting food your way, you'd think they get smart and start putting some other stuff on the boat.

This you'll have to do from your end - write some officials, Salvation Army etc and see what can be done to help organize an effort to get some of this perfectly usable stuff over to your country instead of it just ending up in our landfills.

Do they have any freecycle.org or craigslist.org webistes for your area?

 

thanks for the answers.

I know the ceramic capacitor look like (it look like a coin) but this component much more fatter. This is normal?

Sorry marshallf3, there is no any freecycle.org or craigslist.org websites here

 

They can look that way considering they're multi layer ceramics.

 

Either a tantalum capacitor or more likely an inductor.

Daniel.

 

Hello,

It looks like an overvoltage protection.
When you look at the PCB there is a number starting with Z.

Bertus

 

Hello Bertus,

Look at this pict : http://www.flickr.com/photos/57773390@N05/5318845419/
On the PCB (red circled) it is printed Z952.

 

Those devices are usualy there to protect the video output stages to the CRT from internal HV flashovers & i doubt that this is the problem. Also some video drive chips are designed to shut down when the CRT is at its end of usefull life. This was common in Philips CRT TVs.

 

that is a tantalum capacitor which is placed in Z952 that should be in C926, why?, simply because they are connected in parallel. But Z952 is there for future reference just in case any improvement is available. Z952 is a over voltage protection diode. I believe that your problem is not in the capacitor base in your description of the behavior of your monitor. Here is what you can do, go checked physically the soldering of all transistors in horizontal circuit (big or small) and also the big DIP IC (video IC), you can resolder them all. I guess you monitor is quite old.

 

Hi newbies_hobbyist,
I guest you are right. may be someone has soldered the capacitor in the wrong place (Z952) just they connected paralel.

I'll go check them. Yes, the monitor is very old.
Thanks all for the answers.

 

no it is not soldered in the wrong place it is intentionally soldered there because the hole spacing of Z952 is perfect for the distance between the two pins of tantalum capacitor(width apart) unlike in the C926 designation where the capacitor should be placed holes are far apart so if you are to solder the tantalum capacitor there you need to spread out the two legs but that may beak the pins of capacitor and to avoid that to happen it is best to solder it in Z952 designation.

 

Those devices are usualy there to protect the video output stages to the CRT from internal HV flashovers & i doubt that this is the problem. Also some video drive chips are designed to shut down when the CRT is at its end of usefull life. This was common in Philips CRT TVs.

During their last decade or so of production Sony CRT sets included some sort of feedback into the protection circuitry such that if the CRT didn't bias up to acceptable standards shortly after the video signal was sent to it the power supply was shut down and it would then go through a total restart several times. I had to retire (or rather pass on) my 24" and 27" due to this. Aggravating enough to me to have to wait through several cycles until it finally "caught" but even then the color rendition was poor until it had warmed up for a while but of course you could just leave the set on and there was no problem. I just pulled each apart, cleaned out the dust and resoldered anything that looked as it was becoming a cold solder joint then passed them on to less fortunate people with the explanation of the delay and not to expect a perfect picture. The older 24" went for two more years, the 27" is still kicking the last I heard.

Just way too much heat and wattage draw for my bedroom so I went to an LED backlit LCD 32" Sharp 1080p as my bedroom TV, a 21" LCD monitor for the three PCs in the media system (KVM switch of course) and a soon to be installed 26" LCD monitor to replace this one. I don't mind the heat so much during the winter months but were I to kick on any two of the media servers in addition it would be unbearable in here after a while. I'm seriously thinking about moving two of them (mainly used for storage and downloading) into another room and just keeping the one that's devoted to doing the tuner input and HDMI output in here. I've got CAT5e in a lot of places of this house which, despite common belief, will carry 1 Gbps Ethernet just fine for several hundred feet, you don't need CAT6 unless you're going further. Also have Wireless N but I only put that in so things could be used downstairs where I don't have any hard wiring.

I must have been nuts earlier last year but ended up with about 30 TB of storage in the media system alone, all RAID-5. That was a project in itself as to use 2TB drives in a large RAID configuration they have to be formatted as GPT/GUID and you even need to modify some files in Win XP 64 to fool it into thinking it's actually operating as Server 2003. I'm still having some problems with my main storage server (has 12 ea. 2TB SATA drives and a 500G PATA for the OS) but I'm pretty sure one of the new SATA drives is defective so the next time they go on sale I'll just get an extra to chunk into the RAID set and send the defective one back.

 

Hi newbies_hobbyist,
I guest you are right. may be someone has soldered the capacitor in the wrong place (Z952) just they connected paralel.

I'll go check them. Yes, the monitor is very old.
Thanks all for the answers.

Wish I could be of more help, about all I know is that quite a few different firms built monitors under the Packard Bell name which actually hasn't been its own company for eons. Perhaps if you could identify who actually made the one you have it might be easier to come up with help.

There should be enough telltale signs, especially if it has an FCC sticker on the back as there are ways to decode those to figure out who exactly made something.

http://www.fcc.gov/oet/ea/fccid/

 

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