Owners of Apple Cinema displays know that they are generally purchased at a premium compared to other brands. It's tough to let go of a monitor that you spent so much of your hard-earned cash on. This is a post on how to fix one problem that seems to have plagued many of the 17 and 20" owners.
A gentleman by the name of Bill Catambay was kind enough to share his experiences online. As a result, I will not try to completely recreate my own experience. You can see his post above. I will, however, share with you a couple things that I found in repairing the 20" Cinema Display on my desk. Before I start, here's a quick excerpt from Bill's site:
This article is meant for any owner of an Apple 17" LCD Studio Display (or possibly other LCD displays). Specifically, it is a discussion related to a known problem with the display involving the backlight inverter. Before my display suffered the problem, I never even heard of a backlight inverter. Understanding the symptoms is the first step in deciding whether you have any need to learn what a backlight inverter is (let alone how to replace one).
In opening up my display, there's a few more screws but the idea is the same on Bill's site. What I found helpful was that I didn't need to take off the tape strips once the covers had been removed. You could get at the two screws holding the final mesh panel down just by flipping the tape up just a tad. Here's a picture of the display after getting down to the guts:
In swapping out the cards, I found that the side with the 4 connectors, the replacement board has each connector, in both sets of 2, swapped. Not tough to figure out, except that the existing tape will need to be removed and reapplied. Here's a picture of the old board after connectors and screws were removed:
And a picture of the replacement board before attaching the cables and screws:
Oh and since we're on the subject of the existing tape, I found this underneath one of the pieces of tape when removing the original board:
Pretty groady. I wonder if this was on there while the display was originally being assembled. I find it hard to believe if it got in there during normal usage. And, I do doubt that this was the cause of my backlight problem, but you always wonder don't do you?
Finally, after putting everything back together, I forgot that ADC connectors would work best when the machine is rebooted and not if they are hot-swapped. Otherwise, you might get this:
Good luck and feel free to leave a comment if you have further questions.
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