My beautiful monitor of 6.5 years, a Nokia 445xpro 21" CRT, has suddenly started having intermittent problems. The monitor stays on, but the picture peacefully shuts off, coming back after a while (or a good whack to the side). I have stopped using it for fear it will become undiagnosable.

Does anyone know any repair options that I might have, in the New Jersey / New York / Pennsylvania area? I've read enough sci.electronics.repair to know that CRT's die when one component dies, and it might not be hard to find and replace that part. But who do I trust with the job? The local TV repair guy? The local electronics shop? An "all brands" monitor repair shop (which I can't find in my area)? Or find a Nokia / ViewSonic (took over Nokia) certified shop (though the one recommended by ViewSonic support doesn't answer their phone and won't return my messages)?

And if I can't get it fixed, I guess I'm forced to buy the monitor of my dreams, the IBM T221 22" 3840x2400 LCD. Or, maybe just the Apple 30" Cinema. Or if someone slaps some sense into me, probably just a consumer-grade Samsung 243T 24" widescreen LCD or an LG/Philips 23" widescreen. Wouldn't that be a shame to have to buy those...

Or, are there any sensible recommendations for a replacement monitor? Sure, the LCDs would be nice, but why not get a pair of 21" CRTs for that price? Are there any high quality 21" CRTs anymore? Thanks for your input.

(I used one of my 9 precious posts before post 1,000, which I'm saving for the announcement of the first produced lit buttons, so you can tell this is important to me.)

I was looking at getting a single large widescreen LCD but instead got two 21" Samsung 213t instead. When I got these there were no good choices for a 24" they all had poor resolution. Now you can get some that are pretty good but I still think two is a better choice because I have more options. Like I can hook my mac to one and my pc to the other and view both at once.

Of course, with the t221 hooked up with all four dvi connectors, you get a 41Hz refresh rate... Have no fear though, apperently it will work with a single dvi connector at 12Hz. It does sound beautiful though.

Matthew

If you have the deskspace (& a good video card with dual outputs), get two 21" (or larger) CRT's. If you don't, get the LCD. I run two 21" Viewsonics at the office each at some ridiculous resolution (>1600x1200) and love it. I'd never do that at home because it takes up too much room (I have a 3 year old 17" Samsung 171B). Oh yeah, the two 21" monitors cost about $600 for the pair.

-Zeke

Heehee. I used to work for Nokia monitor tech support (which was contracted out to a separate company). All their repair work for the entire country, and some of Canada, IIRC, was done in Raleigh. Of course, that doesn't help you now. They seem to be out of business, as well they should be. They were terrible. It's too bad, really. The Nokia monitors were really nice. They just never could find a good advertising company, and the fact that they hired those morons to do tech support was a bad move. I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't one of the reasons that they got out of doing monitors.

I had a Nokia 445xpro 21" as well. I've since replace it with a 23" Apple Cinema display and handed it down to a graduate student. It's still humming along, five years later, although it's noticably dimmed. Even when it was new, it had some power issues. If you cranked up the contrast to the level that it would start looking almost as sweet as an LCD, then the monitor would noticably react when a big part of the screen went from black to white (e.g., when web surfing). I figure they didn't give it a big enough power supply or something.

Honestly, it's really hard to justify repairing an old CRT when new CRTs (much less LCDs) have come down so much in price. At NewEgg, 21" CRTs range from $364 to $469. The top-of-the-line 22" NEC/Mitsubishi is still only $645. At that point, you're getting into the starting price range of 20" LCDs with 1600x1200 pixels. Go ahead, you know you want one.

Sounds like a dry solder joint to me. It might be worth having your local TV repair shop spend an hour on it - most dry joints in monitors are the same ones they find in TV's (but sometimes harder to get to).

It's amazing what a good TV repair shop will do actually - a friend had a quote from a large retailer's repair company (Mastercare) of £160 to replace a laptop power supply, the original was BER. He was going to pay it (his parents ran a Chinese restuarant and sent him large amounts of money at university) but I told him to take it to the tiny local TV repair shop to see what they thought. We went back a couple of hours later to be told it was the driver IC and they could repair it in a couple of days for £35.

This was a few years back - these days I would probably find a new compatible part online.

Gareth

I just got my 21" Nokia CRT back from the local electronics shop. They did no work on it because they couldn't reproduce the symptom (screen quietly shuts off, power stays on, an undetermined amount of minutes or a good whack brings it back). They wanted to check the voltage during the symptom to determine if it was an internal power supply, in which case they would declare the monitor beyond help.

Some forums suggested it was a weakened solder joint since it could be fixed by hitting the monitor. Makes sense because the monitor has been 4 feet above a copper pipe baseboard heater for the past 3 years, which I turn off during the work day and on at night during the winter.

Problem is, how can the electronics guy find the weakened connection? They offered to take apart the monitor and review every circuit board, but that would cost $200. Couldn't they multimeter it for less-than-expected values, or would they need the schematics for that?

Or should they know based on my symptom description if it's a solder problem or not? And could the symptom description help pinpoint the physical location of the problem?

Ugh, I just want the monitor to be solid again... and not wink out when I'm at a crucial point in a video game or something. Thanks for your input.

You find bad solder joints mostly by looking at them... And since you can 'fix' the monitor by giving it a whack, I'd also guess it's a bad solder joint. Often, at least on old TVs, the main component having bad solder joints, used to be the high voltage transformer. If it's the case with monitors, I don't know...

Stig