Haha the monitor is blinking (a blinking pain in the ass, at that). And there's no way in hell I'd take a soldering iron to it... taking it apart with a multi-tool was bad enough I just assumed it might be a relatively easy fix, but there's no point replacing random components without good reason, especially since the screen works absolutely perfectly when it's not going black - sometimes for several hours, I might add. To get something of a similar size/gamut in today's market I'd have to fork out around £1k for a NEC or Eizo 27". Edit: Spreadie it's fine, just reflecting text from the board (checked the 24mp RAW file )
This may be dumb, but look carefully at your DVI-Cables. I had this problem with my 2490WUXi and I realized my DVI cable was coming loose. Which was weird... Or just change the cable entirely.
Tried it already dude - I have two DVI cables in use at all times and they are always firmly screwed in place. I've tried changing inputs, outputs and swapping cables, and the problem persists. Strangely, last night I decided to watch a movie and the black screen didn't come back at all before I went to bed at about 1am, so I had almost 4 hours without it. That's the part that makes no sense to me.
By any chance - are you putting your mobile phone close to the monitor ? I am asking this because i already experienced that pretty much any monitor with DisplayPort is reacting exactly in a way you describe (screen goes off for a second) when i have my phone close to the cable and it was communicating with the tower with a higher power (like just finished a call or received an SMS).
I had a look for a replacement Power Supply board (NEC part no. S39336K) but I can only see them listed on feebay and Microdream, for stupid money £150). The signal board (S2090391) isn't much better at £100.
It doesn't work perfectly! It goes black of it's own accord when it feels like it. Spend loads of money buying replacement boards and/or screens then The components to replace are not "random" they are in fact the components on that pcb that have the shortest lifespan. They are also components that are well known to not last forever. Buy a fancy multimeter that can test them, then test them and only replace the ones that are working out of spec - then there is absolutely no random components being replaced without good reason (though, my monitor going black of it's own accord when it feels like it, would be reason enough for me to spend 15 minutes swapping a handful of caps in my monitor, even if it's just a hunch - new caps is never going to do anything but good things)
Margo, I hear ya dude - you might be able to do that sort of thing in a jiffy but for me it'd be a lot of work for what could potentially be a fruitless endeavour. It's possible (and I daresay more likely) that the problem is signal related rather than power related, in which case it has nowt to do with the PSU caps. But I'm eventually going to need a new display anyway, so when that time comes you can have this one for £75 if you want to fix it yourself. Deal? Yeah I saw that and they are pretty expensive, but not unreasonably so - stupid money was getting this monitor in "new" condition for £115 NEC got back to me and said repair would be very expensive because replacement parts are hard to source. They offered me the alternative of a refurb unit with 6mo warranty for... £315 plus shipping. So that'll be three times what I paid for this one then...erm, no thanks LOL. Regarding HDCP, I don't think so. If the problem is software related I'd love to know how it only affects the NEC, irrespective of input/output assignment. One thing that is the same no matter what is that Windows sees the NEC as my "main" display. Perhaps changing things at a software level would make a difference... we shall see.
Well I'll keep you posted. I want to be absolutely certain it's the monitor that's at fault, and I'll be able to test that extensively in a few days when I put my Core2 system together. It'll have onboard graphics and I also have an X1950XT as a backup so will test that too. I've already started looking at what would be a suitable replacement for the 262, and there seem to be two candidates: NEC Spectraview 272 Eizo Coloredge CX271 (I'm leaning towards this because it's cheaper and has 5 year wty) As nothing has worked at all on this system, my plan is to use the other system for a couple of days, several hours at a time (I do that anyway with coursework) and I'll soon know what's what. Strangely, the black screens are more frequent at desktop level, whether it's in firefox or using PS; very rarely doing other things (which are a lot more screen intensive, like playing games or watching movies).
