"David" wrote in message
...
FYI the #1 reason these are board level repair is due to the construction
of
the boards themselves.

Most of the signal and driver boards use VSLI surface mount ic's with 168
pins soldered to the board. The boards are typically 4 to 8 layer boards,
not unlike a typical 1GHz computer motherboard.

That was my assumption. You don't bother with component level
troubleshooting when you already know the faults are most likely going to be
inside one of a few VLSI chips. And since packing all functions into fewer
and fewer chips is the norm, it means more and more jobs will entail board
level service. I suppose if the chips were available separately and the
tech really really enjoys using his hot air rework station, that's an
option. But since time is money, shops wouldn't bother with it. For
in-home service, it's more practical to do board level anyway. It just
holds less appeal for my analytical side.

Some manufactures will 'loan' out any special equipment required to
perform the
alignments following a repair in rural areas for authorized servicers.

I hope ya don't mind my picking your brains, but...
Interesting it should require alignment at all. I mean, the screen isn't
susceptible to magnetic fields as with a CRT, so no compensation is
required. Each pixel is fired independently, so no convergence, purity,
focus settings are required. I presume the tuner has been reduced to a few
chips and doesn't allow for adjustment there. Everything's digitally
controlled, so presumably there are no sync adjustments. What technician
adjustments are there with these things? Power supply voltages?

Is there a special rig that's required for testing the screen itself?
There's no gun structure and the emissive elements can't be accessed, so I
assume the method for testing one is to hookup a known good controller board
(or stand-alone generator) to it?

-Ray-