I've noticed the last few days that my MFD screen seemed a bit dim. I have checked all of the brightness settings and also the thumbwheel on the left side of the steering wheel. Everything is right, the only thing I can do is make it even more dim. I asked my friend the toyota tech and he said he has seen this before and the usual solution is just to replaced the MFD and there is a company somewhere that they send them off to be refurbished. Apparently a refurbished one costs $800 and a brand-new one costs $4,000. Neither of those sound very good to me. I figure if there is something inside that this 3rd party company can fix, then it is probably something I can fix since I'm pretty skilled with a soldering iron. But before I start taking it apart, I thought I'd check with people on here. I saw some other threads in my searching but were all related to Gen-2 and stereo installs.
Could be that the backlight, which in most LCD displays is a fluorescent tube, has dimmed with age. This is not something to be changed out by the faint of heart. The tube is typically not much larger in diameter than a #2 pencil lead, is made of glass, and can not be flexed even a fraction of a MM without shattering.
I have changed backlights in laptops before on many occasion. (I'm in the computer refurbishment business) so I'm quite familiar with that process. However, I don't believe that is the issue because the issue seemed to occur suddenly, by just starting the car up one day. Typically if it is a tube, it will happen gradually and it tends to be darker near the center or turn pink in color. The inverter would be more likely, except that still doesn't really fit with what I'm used to because when backlight inverters go out, the screen either flickers, or doesn't light up at all. So that is why this is such a mystery to me.
I've got a spare picked up off of Ebay a couple of years ago. Send me a PM and we'll do a deal. I had plans but haven't been doing anything on it. I just wanted a bench unit. Bob Wilson
