4.2Crew

Great results: Fast turnaround, friendly service, and a noticably "blacker" background. All for under $140 including shipping. One of the best Audi related vendors I've delt with to date...

Just Me

or something else?

Admiral of Autobahn

transplanted for the RED one. I HATE that red one, and AUDI F'd up not installing the hi-res color ones across their whole line in '02. They did it for the A4 when it had red and color displays depending if you ordered NAV, some even came with color without NAV because I heard they had no more red ones left to install. They could easily have given them to the more deserving(expensive) A6's.

squidix9

I should just get to it and send mine to them. I'm still under the delusion that mine is something simple and I can fix it myself. It keeps teasing me in that it sometimes will actualy work. Or different rows will fail at different times. I am hopeful it is a loose connection to the cluster. I'm not usually that lucky though.

BernieBenz

Not normally so, its a thermal problem. Mine works great when cold, as it warms up the top fades first and moves down the display. DIY reported fixes include ducting AC cold air into the back of the display (haven’t tried that), playing with the temp control thermistor on the narrow flat cable to achieve better contact with the back of the display (didn’t work for me). Any other ideas?

jbchinoca

Heat seems to be the enemy for mine as well. Cold, no problem. At it's worst though, I only miss one line near the top, and one near the bottom. My preventatvie measures are to always use my windshield/dash cover, I also stuff a towel into the instrument cluster. And the sunroof is always popped open in back to ventilate heated air.

Boston Driver

That is great news! It is about time a vendor has come up with an alternative to replacement of the entire instrument cluster. Seems like such a waste of $$ to have to replace the WHOLE thing just for the central display. That and not having to deal with the whole Immobilizer thing is a huge plus!!!

I am curious to find out the long-term feedback on the repair. For example, how will it do this summer in the heat, next summer in the heat, etc.

Mine is perfect...just had it replaced by Audi under warranty a bit more than a year ago. Covered under Audi Pure Protection (platinum coverage). But it is nice to know that there is an alternative for those without warranties!

Admiral of Autobahn

The ones they had before were same as everyone else, cheap asian knockoffs. They had problems displaying proper hue/contrast brightness. But since they have the OEM ones now, they said it's a lifetime warranty due to the components being better, silver or something.

But the thing is, they told me they have the COLOR display as well and are working on a way to implement it over the red one. Problem is it's backlighted by maybe a flourescent, instead of LEDs. So there's apparently wiring and maybe IC software differences that need to be worked around to implement the better LCD. So until then, I'm holding off. They said they might know last week but then said they've been too swamped with orders to monkey with it.