Panasonic Plasma TX-P42G30E - panel defect - black vertical bar - broken data driver - case study

I spotted this Panasonic on eBay classifieds for little money in my hometown and there was no reason not to buy it, even though I suspected by the looks of the photo that it was a panel failure. I could sell the boards on eBay in case my remote diagnose was right.

Let's have a look:



The vertical black bar is the characteristic symptom of a dead data driver. It can't be the scan board, because the left side is ok. But why is almost half of the screen dead?

The data drivers, which are part of the panel, are connected to the C1 and C2 boards. The C1 supplies the right side with 7 drivers, the C2 the left side with 8 drivers. That's why the image failure does not cover exactly half of the screen as you can see in the next image. It is half minus one vertical driver bar.



Could this be a C1 board failure or is the broken driver pulling the whole side down? Let's verify. To access the connectors, a few things had to be removed. Then I pulled out the connector to the broken driver.



And look at that, the other 6 came back alive!



So this settles the case. The panel is dead. To be 100% sure, I plugged the dead driver back in. Yup, there were ghosts of the previous image and the current image wouldn't appear.



Unfortunately, my plan B, which was to use the boards as spare part donors for my other two Panasonic plasmas (in case they break again), proved to be wrong. To my surprise, this one is not built fully with SMD parts, it still has through-hole semiconductors. I did not expect that, because it was produced in the same year as my P42ST30E, and I assumed they would have similar chassis.