Probably just needs a few power supply capacitors replaced, all the old 4:3 dell flat screens are reaching this stage of their life.

as time marches on, those capacitors will go bad, it's inevitable. time to replace them.

Why is it that, these LCD monitors are reaching the "capacitor failure" stage of their life, while millions of much older CRTs keep marching on with very few capacitor problems? It's a shame because those little 4:3 Dells are quite good. Capacitor plague-related thing maybe?

Hope it's just cap issues and that your monitor comes back to life!

Ultrax wrote:

Why is it that, these LCD monitors are reaching the "capacitor failure" stage of their life, while millions of much older CRTs keep marching on with very few capacitor problems? It's a shame because those little 4:3 Dells are quite good. Capacitor plague-related thing maybe?

Hope it's just cap issues and that your monitor comes back to life!

some monitors have bad caps, some don't, like motherboards...

I had an LG LCD from 2007 that had capacitor issues around 2013
at the same time my Phillips LCD from 2006 still works fine.
and a Samsung LCD from 2005 has some issues in the panel (like the corners are yellowed depending on the angle you look at it you notice it easy) but still works fine other than that

these all had a lot of use a not a lot of care over the years.

when it comes to CRTs...
well, I had like 3-4 (all the ones I had...) from 2001-2004 fail (with some bonus smell) the last 10 years and they weren't even used that much.

I trust LCDs to age a lot better.

I bet they use crapacitors (cheap crap brands) in those monitors, why not good japanese capacitors (Rubycon, Nichicon, Sanyo, Panasonic, etc.) thats what i would replace the failed caps with, japanese ones like panasonic or rubycon.

SPBHM wrote:

some monitors have bad caps, some don't, like motherboards... […]
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Ultrax wrote:

Why is it that, these LCD monitors are reaching the "capacitor failure" stage of their life, while millions of much older CRTs keep marching on with very few capacitor problems? It's a shame because those little 4:3 Dells are quite good. Capacitor plague-related thing maybe?

Hope it's just cap issues and that your monitor comes back to life!

some monitors have bad caps, some don't, like motherboards...

I had an LG LCD from 2007 that had capacitor issues around 2013
at the same time my Phillips LCD from 2006 still works fine.
and a Samsung LCD from 2005 has some issues in the panel (like the corners are yellowed depending on the angle you look at it you notice it easy) but still works fine other than that

these all had a lot of use a not a lot of care over the years.

when it comes to CRTs...
well, I had like 3-4 (all the ones I had...) from 2001-2004 fail (with some bonus smell) the last 10 years and they weren't even used that much.

I trust LCDs to age a lot better.

I have a couple CRTs, they work fine, but i use LCDs cause i don't have that much room. so i use LCDs to save space on my table.

It sucks when it happens. I had a Dell die on me as well not to long ago. Different problem than yours though...

Dell P170S monitor with display issues

Ultrax wrote:

Why is it that, these LCD monitors are reaching the "capacitor failure" stage of their life, while millions of much older CRTs keep marching on with very few capacitor problems? It's a shame because those little 4:3 Dells are quite good. Capacitor plague-related thing maybe?

Hope it's just cap issues and that your monitor comes back to life!

Combination of cheap components and the stress they're under - the ones that cause the failure are always large filter caps in the power supply, necessary for the backlight which CRTs don't have.

From my personal experience, dying CCFL backlight is a bigger issue with those old monitors. Very difficult to replace as well, unlike the capacitors...

Windows9566 wrote:

My Dell 1901FP just died, it doesn't have power, when i plug in the power cord, the light doesn't illuminate nor does the Dell Ultrasharp logo on the screen come up.

I bought a Dell 2007FP for my retro shenanigans two weeks ago.
It worked fine for a week, but then the backlight started to flicker sometimes.

I either have to replace some caps or the CCFL's, I guess. Did that once on an old notebook, so it should be a piece of cake. FINDING the correct CCFL might be more of a problem, though...

schmatzler wrote:

I bought a Dell 2007FP for my retro shenanigans two weeks ago. It worked fine for a week, but then the backlight started to flic […]
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Windows9566 wrote:

My Dell 1901FP just died, it doesn't have power, when i plug in the power cord, the light doesn't illuminate nor does the Dell Ultrasharp logo on the screen come up.

I bought a Dell 2007FP for my retro shenanigans two weeks ago.
It worked fine for a week, but then the backlight started to flicker sometimes.

I either have to replace some caps or the CCFL's, I guess. Did that once on an old notebook, so it should be a piece of cake. FINDING the correct CCFL might be more of a problem, though...

my LG with bad PSU caps (it was external in this monitor, making it a lot easier) would flicker a lot and become stable after 30s or a min initially, but it kept getting worse and when I checked the caps they looked really bad.
PSU caps were replaced and it completely fixed it for a while, but I had other issues later on

One of the big reasons why LCDs suffer capacitor problems, whereas CRT capacitors seem more durable, is that LCDs use a switching power supply. These stress capacitors out a lot more than a CRT. It doesn't help that most LCD PSUs are stuffed into a small monitor case with minimal ventilation.

Besides, all the really bad CRTs have already died, caught fire or become too blurry to use. Having a CRT reach 10 years of age and still work well wasn't that common, even when computers were supposedly made of sterner stuff. Now you can have LCDs 15 years old and they often don't seem worse for wear. To say they were better or more reliable than CRTs goes against my own experience with the blighters.

Ultrax wrote:

Why is it that, these LCD monitors are reaching the "capacitor failure" stage of their life, while millions of much older CRTs keep marching on with very few capacitor problems? It's a shame because those little 4:3 Dells are quite good. Capacitor plague-related thing maybe?

Hope it's just cap issues and that your monitor comes back to life!

as you already figured:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague
most of the older 4:3, 5:4 and early 16:10 LCD displays fall into that timeframe, hence why they die so often while on older hardware caps just reach the end of their "natural lifespan" sooner or later which can take much longer than plagued caps.
recapping LCD power supplies usually is an easy fix though, so they are not lost, I already repaired some myself 😀

canthearu wrote:

One of the big reasons why LCDs suffer capacitor problems, whereas CRT capacitors seem more durable, is that LCDs use a switching power supply. These stress capacitors out a lot more than a CRT. It doesn't help that most LCD PSUs are stuffed into a small monitor case with minimal ventilation.

Besides, all the really bad CRTs have already died, caught fire or become too blurry to use. Having a CRT reach 10 years of age and still work well wasn't that common, even when computers were supposedly made of sterner stuff. Now you can have LCDs 15 years old and they often don't seem worse for wear. To say they were better or more reliable than CRTs goes against my own experience with the blighters.

That and the fact that most CRTs are from before the capacitor plague era- by the time caps were inevitably awful, early CCFL TFTs were replacing CRTs.

What I wonder is how the newer LED backlights will fare vs CCFL. Instinctively I suspect they will do much better, as they don't need the high voltages, nor inverters, nor just plain amount of current - plus by the time LED was introduced, better-quality caps. But who knows... we'll see.

LED backlit TVs seem to do worse than CFLs, you can already see dark areas in completely new TVs and in some years the LEDs in that spot will fail while there are new spots emerging elsewhere on the panel. CFL tube runs 10+ years easily.
Electronics side is fine for at least 5 years now and there are rarely any failures in that part, but backlight LEDs fail often...

SPBHM wrote:

my LG with bad PSU caps (it was external in this monitor, making it a lot easier) would flicker a lot and become stable after 30s or a min initially, but it kept getting worse and when I checked the caps they looked really bad.

I just opened mine up and all of the caps look fine. None of them are swollen (not even slightly) and no leaks.
There is a repair guide out there for my monitor where it looks really bad, but mine does not seem to have this problem:

https://www.hardwareinsights.com/repairing-di … sharp-2007fp/2/

Oh well. I'll just wait and see. For now, it's only flickering very rarely and I can live with that. If it gets worse, I'll whip out my ESR meter and see what's going on.

They don't have to look bad to cause issues.