Smile monitor shut down with a vertical line on the screen - chassis CA6415-CA6515

Smile monitor shut down with a vertical line on the screen - chassis CA6415-CA6515


Most of my customers come to me through referrals by others who I have maybe repaired their equipment and are happy with our service.

So I got this phone call from a customer who wanted me to look at his monitor which according to him was dead.


It was just near my residence and I decided to take a walk there.


When I arrived at the site I connected the monitor back to the CPU and applied power: Relay is heard clicking as the monitor try to come up and... The monitor came up and shut down after a few seconds, but before it shut down I was able to see on the screen a thin vertical line.


Facts at hand.
1. Monitor came up and shut down
2. Vertical line on the screen.


Probable cause: maybe the monitor is being shut down by the safety circuit because the fault is a serious one.


Vertical line on the screen- Usually vertical line is caused by failure in the horizontal circuit especially the deflection circuit.


For those who are new to electronics repair let me emphasis here that whenever you see a horizontal line on the screen, the fault is on the Vertical circuit, while vertical line on the screen point to fault on horizontal circuits.


Vertical line is caused by failure in the horizontal circuit especially the deflection circuit. Therefore check components for deflection circuit gone open (i.e. the horizontal pulses are not going back to the ground. The culprit could be an open capacitor(ceramic like the s-correction capacitor, linearity coil open, dry joint on the horizontal deflection yoke connection, also the yoke could be open etc.


So I opened the monitor and went straight to the deflection circuit to test my hypothesis. I found capacitor (c125) 0.39uF which is the same as no 394 was totally open.

I replaced it with capacitor no 474(0.47uF) which was readily available in the market and the monitor started smiling again.


Tip1: when measuring the components around the fly back in-circuit there is a tendency to get low resistance especially on capacitors (Ceramic) even if they are open because of having other low resistance components or path and hence never trust your reading when doing measurement in circuit. You must remove one leg in order to get correct reading. This applies also when using ESR meter. Sometimes if you notice a funny reading from your ESR meter it’s better to disconnect one leg from the circuit.


Tip 2: Observe carefully to see if there is any capacitor which has its body surface bulging out. Even slight swell on the capacitor body is enough evidence to suspect a faulty capacitor. (Observe carefully the body of all ceramic capacitors: if bad they become swollen and look like the back of a camel-or underfeed cat. i.e. backbone plus a big stomach) by the way sometimes you don't get the exact replacement for the s-cap. In this case you can always use a cap which is near that in capacitance but same working voltage.

Thank you guys




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