bad LCD, why does it happen?

Pulled from a "dead" Atari Lynx:



You can clearly see the red/green/blue column and the damage is not consistent across the column but it did stay on individual rows. The Lynx front cover shows no damage so I am sure it wasn't caused by someone smashing on the front. No visible crack or anything on the glass, and it couldn't be water damage as those are usually limited to the edge and not spotty in the middle.

So why do some LCD just up and die?

PS yeah LCD is toast, next to impossible to repair. The Lynx is working fine however with a spare LCD I saved when I did LCD mod whose image quality is way superior to the original 25 year old LCD. So now I have a total of 3 working Lynx, one with LCD mod.

 

They're called liquid crystal displays, I've always wondered if they could become solid crystal displays instead (obviously to the detriment of being a usable display).

 

Just my opinion, but I believe that maybe some air got mixed in when they pressed the glass panels together therefore not affecting the LCD screen at the current time, but as time passed the air started to destabilize parts of the LCD liquid and turn it to this. Also, looks like the Game Gear uses the same LCD screen.

 

It does look like Game Gear but the pinout and resolution are different. Just same technology with very large pixel and visible color cels. AFAIK Lynx is a bit odd with 160x102 resolution but if one abused the individual cels they could get effective 480x102 resolution. Some very small font are readable on the old LCD but it does not work with new LCD with the mod I mentioned above. Only a few homemade games used tiny fonts, commercial games used larger font that is still readable on new LCD.

FWIW, with modern LCD, I would need magnifying glass to see individual RGB cels. Viewing angle is much wider on newer LCD and with LED side lightning, much brighter, whiter, and less power guzzling vs old design.