Why can’t we fix broken TV screens without fully replacing the panel?
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the 8 million pixels in your tv arent placed by hand or something. They are literally grown in place. There is no process that can remove just one (or even a small section) of broken ones and replace them with fresh ones, and ESPECIALY no process that can be done out side of a dust free cleanroom.
TV panels arent assembled from smaller bits, its really just 1 single part, so when that part breaks, you cant just repair it, you have to replace it. Its more like a windshield than it is a collection of lightbulbs
It’s like one big piece with tiny circuit connections to each picture element. It’s not made by hand, it is basically a single computer chip. When they make them, they discard a certain number of screens after testing because of failed pixels (or they use them for non-critical displays).
There is just no way to repair them.
A tv panel is a large piece of thin glass with millions of pixels bonded to it. When the glass is broken, it also physically destroys many of the pixels.
Gluing the glass back together would leave a very noticeable seam and would not fix the destroyed pixels.
The amount of effort to repair a panel would far exceed that of a new panel/tv.
I’m sure there are a few broken screens that could be repaired, but those would take specialized equipment and training, and many aren’t repairable at all.
There are layers of glass with invisible electrically conductive traces printed on them. How do you fix such a trace if the glass is broken?
How do you even get access to the trace without causing more damage if it’s glued in the middle of other layers?
There are other problems that can come up, like ICs that drive the rows and columns getting fried, or the flat flex that connects them to the glass getting damaged. These connections are MUCH smaller than a normal circuit board.
As others have said, the pixels aren’t as much installed as they are “grown” in place on the glass substrate.
The process is very similar to photo printing, with masks, projectors, etc being used to imprint the images of each layer onto a photosensitive coating before being “developed”, also in a similar fashion. A disproportionate amount of our tech is made with this method in some form – chips, circuit boards, displays all use photolithography, rendering most electronics nothing more than a composite artwork with some melted metal bits holding the printings all together.
A lot of electronics can be repaired but it’s time consuming to test every single diode, register and IC unit on a board. Its cheaper to just replace a specific bad board. It comes down to paying someone $500 to diagnose and repair a TV or just buy a new one for $500. Same with screen panels, the cost to remove, clean and repair is probably more expensive than getting a new TV
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