What's the MTBF of LCD light bulbs?

[erwin1978]

I personally have my computer on roughly 15 hours a day every single day because I'm a nerd. There's no way around it. I know for a fact that I have to change the flourescent bulbs in my room every year so I'm thinking it may be the same with flat panels. Are they easily changeable? What's your own experience on this matter? How long do they really last? Let me know before I splurge on an LCD.

 

[Nodsu]

The life of LCD backlight bulbs varies quite a lot. I have seen numbers quoted from 10 000 hours to 60 000 hours. So it will be roughly 1-6 years when on 24/7

 

[nein]

I personally have my computer on roughly 15 hours a day every single day because I'm a nerd. There's no way around it. I know for a fact that I have to change the flourescent bulbs in my room every year so I'm thinking it may be the same with flat panels. Are they easily changeable? What's your own experience on this matter? How long do they really last? Let me know before I splurge on an LCD.

The normal fluorescent bulbs you see are hot-cathode types, they are no longer used in new display panels, their typical life span is greater than 4000 HRS and a lot of them will last 8000 HRS.

New display panels used cold-cathode fluorescent tubes, their expected typical life span is 4 times the hot-cathode types as the low projection. The current new display panels failed fairly often from the shoddy engineering of the power supply necessary to the cold-cathode tubes and not the cold-cathode tubes themselves. I've yet ever seen one actually fail due to normal usage aging.

Even xray tubes which used cold-cathode instead of hot-cathode last much longer, I've seen some of them failed after 10 years of service.