No experience in this case here but it looks very tough to unsolder, specialy when you cant just clip the screen off and desolder the pins 1 by 1. Where i worked years ago, they used a solder bath for this kind of stuff. It looks like u ve to desolder it from the mainboard (underneath) anyway.
Its worth to check out the old elektron-user forum and do some research, i remember some guys that replaced their LCDs there .
A screenside-desoldering is what I did. It took me some patience to do it, I wish you good luck.
Anyone else gone through with this? Could anyone advice me what LCD screen similar to the blue/white of A4/Rytm that would work as a replacement? (preferably with link to ebay or aliexpress or whatever…) The red has killed my eyes since 2007 and I realize that desperate times demand desperate measures.
I got this -
It was not easy - the pins are super tight even with the solder off. However, it’s totally worth it. I used chopsticks to take it the final bit.
After first turning it on I thought I had did it wrong but it just needed the contrast adjusted.
That is awesome - great job! Do you have a pic of the MD screen you took out? How similar are they?
Nice.
Apparently red is the first colour our eyes see and also the last seen when sight goes, in fact blue light is more likely to be a problem than red, red light is said to be easier on the eye.
I suppose brighness and personal preference do play a part, but I never had a problem with the red screen myself, but I do remember some people complaining about it before I got my MD so I was half expecting it to be fatiguing.
When I changed the screen on my monomachine I cut the old one off very carefully with fine sidecutters pin at a time, then used a heated solder sucker to remove the pins from the PCB. It was tricky and time consuming though.
That adafruit screen looks nice!
Blue is my favorite color and the screen looks awesome but blue light has more of a negative effect than you might think.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/
(Gotta make it to the latter half of this to get to the blue part)
Especially avoid blue LEDs which are usually burning your retinas with UV. I don’t know if LCDs emit UV or not.
I bottled it. I couldn’t find this as an item [ it’s tricky when you don’t know the name of what you’re after] and thought maybe it had to stay making the job even tougher:
It’s called: a pin header strip
Had I known I’d have just desoldered from the board it’s mounted to and replaced it. So disappointingly I sent it to Sweden where they finished the job off. My ego was well and truly battered. I know it would taken a matter of minutes for the money spent…but hey ho it works now:
Here it is with racks that allow the dust cover to be used simultaneously:
Nice! Did you/elektron put in pin headers on both the screen and the mainboard, and connect with a ribbon? I’m wondering if there is space for a ribbon. I’d prefer not to solder the replacement screen directly to the mainboard. I’d like to clip out the original, remove the pins and suck the solder (like Darenager so far), solder in a pin header to the mainboard, and hopefully that admits some type of ribbon cable or header combination to connect the new LCD. Have people that have done it got an opinion on that? ( My machinedrum is on order, can’t open it to look yet. I had an MD back in 2001 and really did hate the red )
Sorry I missed your message! Yeah that should be possible. My ego wishes I’d stuck with it but like I said I didn’t know the pin thing pictured existed. Had I, I’d have easily done it myself.
Did you do your own?
Ugh the notion of all my Elektrons having classic gameboy color displays fills me with such delight I almost want to write a buzzfeed article about it.
Where can I get these displays?
Look for “yellow green” colored displays, I think that these come very close to the gameboy classic display. If you want a true classic experience, I suggest to disable background lighting 
Beauty. Nice job!
The Red Screen Rocks as well as The Machinedrum. if you can get the UW i strongly recommend the MDUW
Rod
