My grandfather had a viewsonic va720 17", It died, we replaced it, I got it free. It is now 4 years old (November 2002) the lamps were aging, the internal powersupply would try to fire them once and shut off after a second. once the lamps heat up they run fine I put together a powersupply with no shutdown (The display gets to full brightness after about 30seconds) the ccfl tools old AT powersupply with fan lead cut (any 12 volt power would work..) powersupply and back light all wired up The back light switch A true finishing touch (it's very usable now) As for brightness. It's not so bad for a 4 year old screen that has been in use constantly... Here it is vs. a 5month old LCD (yes I photoshopped my own cat ><) Now I can enjoy the amazing 30ms response time all over again
I showed it to my pop this morning holding it like this... First thing he said was "it looks like a bomb"
Surely you could have pulled 12v from within inside the panel itself to drive your inverters. I know one of my panels takes 12v direct input, and a few of my others spit out 12v from their internal power supplies. Otherwise good revival of an otherwise broken unit, interesting approach
