LCD Stripping for Bezel Management

Squalish

Gawd
Joined
Aug 23, 2002
Messages
647
I'm looking at this image from an LCD projector build-log and contemplating Eyefinity. Once rectified and scaled, Photoshop tells me that this 17" stripped laptop monitor appears to have internal bezels of 0.19" on the right, 0.10" on the top, 0.11" on the left, and 0.21" on the bottom of the screen. This represents a third of an inch black gap from one screen to the next. It's about an equivalent gap to holding a Bic pen between the adjacent pixels. The steel casing that supports the actual panel is intact, one only needs to exercise common sense in not bending/cracking the thin panel and be careful with the thin ribbon cables, which are nearly impossible to fix. The other boards need to be supported as well.

But this is a hobby that has extreme case-modders hanging around welding automotive radiators to their WW2-era ammo boxes. Surely we can replace a piece of injection-molded plastic.

As far as I can tell, a third of an inch combined is far better than any retail consumer monitor, but not quite a match for "seamless" professional-level multi-panel monitors, which run about 10x the cost for an equivalent product.

Independant resale value and warranty coverage are probably not going to survive this step (assuming that the panel itself does), but there's gotta be some people who would pay a mint for a 3-panel frame - if you succeed, you'll be able to unload it.

So is LCD stripping going to come into vogue?


Posted on [H]ardForum & WSGF
 
well, when my VW266H's show up, that's definitely one of the first things i'm taking a look at ;)
 
Two things to add:
pics from someone who did this two years ago with three 19" panels:
stripcompare.jpg





And another stripping guide for a 22" monitor.
 
Oh, it is very easily doable, if you know what you're doing. Getting rid of the tri-display wouldn't be hard, but you could also keep it for quite some time. I probably would, just to show off an old project.

I was thinking about doing this as I can very easily get plexiglass for free and it would be pretty fun to attempt... Just need to find some good high quality (and cheap) monitors.
 
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Just need to find some good high quality (and cheap) monitors.

The classic engineering cliche is that you can pick any two of cheap, fast and good. But in the monitor market, you may only pick one of cheap, fast and good.
 
Two things to add:
pics from someone who did this two years ago with three 19" panels:
stripcompare.jpg





And another stripping guide for a 22" monitor.
I was curios to see how it would mount once stripped, i should have remembered that it mounted to the internal frame. Considering he used 3 smaller inexpensive monitors i'd say he did a great job...imagine using 3 cheap 22" Acer's? It would probably look fantastic, and cost less than $500 total.

And to think, while you're in there you can experiment by slightly loosening the tft panel fastening screws to see if you can reduce backlight bleed, talk about killing two birds with one stone.
 
I stripped a laptop monitor a few months ago when I was converting my old HP laptop into an all-in-one system (the hinges had broken so the laptop was pretty useless, but the guts still worked). I wasn't stitching monitors together like that; my main objective was simply making the monitor thinner.

Anyways, it was really easy to re-mount. All I had to do was take advantage of the mounting mechanism that was in place before - small screws which ran into the metal frame of each monitor. You could do this on the system seen above too - sure, some of the sides are obstructed, but the top and bottom of each panel still have perfectly good mounting mechanisms exposed.
 
I just just did this to my single monitor and I must say it looks much nicer compared to the big fugly bezel. :D
img1097r.jpg

img1100q.jpg

img1099w.jpg

img1102vc.jpg

img1103qz.jpg


It looks like the front metal bezel part easily comes off so I might paint it flat black. I used double sided tape to stick the OSD controls where they would be originally located with the bezel in place.

Sorry for my crappy photography skills. :p
 
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