After verifying I could illuminate LED strings of a LG LPP133WH2(TL)(M2) salvaged from a Dell laptop, I set it aside to work on the final panel in my stack of LCD laptop panels. This was salvaged from a Sony VAIO laptop whose model number I no longer know.

The original owner had spilled some cola on it. Good news: the spill did not immediately kill the machine so data could be pulled off averting any loss of data. Bad news: the computer started failing intermittently in strange ways as corrosion took hold, and eventually died a few weeks after the initial spill.

Removing the panel I see a label with designation Chunghwa CLAA133UA01. (Along with some dried coke residue.) Web lookup indicated this is a LED-backlit panel with 1600×900 resolution. Better than the 1366×768 resolution we see on baseline laptops today, but still short of full 1920×1080 resolution. Like the rest of my stack of panels, I decided it was not interesting enough to revive as a display.

My first task was removing the polarizer film in the front of the display, something I have yet to perfect through several past experiments. So far I’ve been able to remove the film in one piece but failed to clean off adhesive residue. For this panel, I didn’t even get that far. This panel used glue that was very strong, apparently stronger than the tensile strength of the polarizer film! Roughly a quarter of the way through peeling, the film tore apart and I decided to abandon polarizer retrieval.

Looking at the tear was mildly interesting. It was a zig-zag pattern instead of a straight line. This material is weakest at plus or minus 45 degrees relative to screen viewing orientation. Does that have any relation to polarization angle, or is it indicative of something else? I don’t have any tools to probe that question so I will set it aside for now and move on to the LED backlight.