Broken laptop screen?

So my friend poured some tea into his laptop, and the screen looks like this:

Even in the brighter areas, the colors are not exactly right.

He took the laptop to a "tech", who said it's the inverter. I'm pretty sure it's not, since that is only responsible for the backlight. If that goes wrong, there's simply no backlight. So I think it's either the LCD itself, or maybe something went wrong on the motherboard (GPU, vRAM something like that).

If it was some component on the motherboard, then it would produce the same result on an external display. If it's only the LCD, then the picture would look normal on an external monitor.

So if I plug the laptop into an external display, I think I can make sure whether it's the LCD or the motherboard. Is that right? Or is there anything else that could cause this?

Solution 1:

To answer one of your questions. Yes, plugging the laptop in to an external monitor will likely determine if the issue is caused on the motherboard vs between the motherboard, inverter/ribbon, and LCD. My guess is that it is between the inverter and the LCD that some damage occured.

Let us know the result of the external monitor check and I can probably give some more information.

What is the make/model of the laptop?