Repairing a Samsung SyncMaster 225BW

Another department on campus sent out a note to the IT crowd complaining about 6 of their Samsung 255BW’s going out within a year. After some brief searching, it seems like this is a common problem with, you guessed it, bad capacitors. Being the fun loving tinkerer that I am, I offered my services to replace them.

A few days later, one of the bad ones showed up, and I was able to pull it apart and find, yes indeed, two of the caps had bulged to the point of leaking (as you can see from the title image, in the lower left corner).

With some searching on the badcaps forums I found the replacement caps that seemed the most reasonable in cost were some United Chemi-Con ones. The page for this monitor on badcaps is here. Much like most of the people on the thread, the two failed caps for me were the 820uF. All the stock caps were CapXon (which apparently has a reputation for this type of issue… at least during the time these were manufactured).

This particular monitor has the following electrolytic caps:

• 2x 680uF 25v
• 2x 820uF 25v
• 1x 330uF 25v
• 1x 150uF 450v
• 1x 47uF 50v

Here are the capacitors I ordered, with links to Digi-key, and the numbers I ordered.

• 15x 680uF 25v
• 15x 820uF 25v
• 20x 330uF 25v

Total cost was $23.16 with shipping (the shipping was a bit obnoxious since they used a rather large box, and a ton of packing. But, at least it was eco-friendly packing, and they were well packed.

Now, you may think, “why order 20 of the 330uF caps, when each monitor only has 1?” The problem is, there are apparently 2 versions of the power supply, one that uses 2 820uF, 2 680uF, and 1 330uF. The OTHER version uses 2 820uF, and 3 330uF caps. Not having seen the other 5 monitors, I have no idea which version of the power supply they use.

Both power supplies also have a 47uF 50v capacitor, and a 150uF 450v capacitor, but from reading, it doesn’t sound like either of those fail (makes sense, they both have higher voltage tolerances).

Getting the power supply out was a bit tricky until you know how to do it. Best info I found was a youtube video here. Once the bezel is off, it’s smooth sailing, and pulling out the power supply is cake.

Replacing the actual capacitors took about 10 minutes, and resulted in the image you see on the right. Putting the monitor back together was a snap, and it powered up perfectly. While I haven’t heard back from the owner yet (he picked it up less than 2 hours ago), I will assume it’s working just fine. At the same time, he dropped off the other 5 for me to do, which I hope to tackle tonight.

That’s really all there is to it. This process is a heck of a lot easier than doing the iMac G5’s I did years ago (they required about 20 minutes to disassemble, 10 minutes of soldering, then 20 minutes to reassemble). Hopefully this will help someone else repair their monitor rather than just tossing it! =)