So, your new monitor finally arrived and you're super excited to play games at 4K
or watch techie on a screen that's big enough to let you spot that weird growth
on my chin that uh Sorry. Anyway, so you
plug in your new display, but something doesn't seem right. Is there something
wrong with it, or do you just need to adjust some dials?
While it's true that many new monitors could use some adjustments called
calibration to look their best, defects
out of the box are unfortunately not that uncommon. So, what should you be
looking for on both new displays as well as your existing display after you've
been using it for a while? Well, one relatively straightforward thing you can
check for is dead or stuck pixels. This
is as easy as throwing up a little application called Dead Pixel Buddy on
your screen and cycling through all the different colors, looking for any small
points that are black or displaying the wrong color. This can happen due to
defects in the manufacturing process or even from touching your screen too
roughly if you've owned your monitor for some time. Stuck pixels can sometimes be
fixed with gentle pressure from something soft like a pencil eraser or
with freely available utilities that flash many colors per second on the spot
where your stuck pixel is. Dead pixels, however, are usually dead for good. So,
check to see if your monitor is still under warranty and what the dead pixel
terms of your warranty are. Some manufacturers need like five in one spot
in order to qualify. But what if your pixels all look okay, but you're
noticing areas that are strangely brighter than the rest of the screen?
Well, if these areas are toward the corners or the edges, you could be
suffering from bleeding, which isn't to say blood loss. I'm talking, of course,
about backlight bleeding, which happens because modern flat panel displays, with
the exception of OLEDs, work by shining
a strong backlight through a liquid crystal display panel to create an
image. Oftentimes, this backlight is not
completely blocked from leaking around the outsides of the LCD by the screen
bezel. This results in that backlight
bleed that causes that lightness around the edges. Now, I do have some bad news
about backlight bleed, and that is that the best way to avoid it is simply to
buy a higher quality display with higher
manufacturing standards, as there's pretty much nothing you can do to fix it
yourself. Although, some intrepid do-it-yourselfers have tried dismantling
their monitors and sealing the edges of the LCD with electrical tape. But if you
have an IPS panel, make sure that you are not confusing backlight bleed with
an effect that many have called IPS glow. This is a glow that's present on
some parts of IPS screens, especially when you view dark images, at an off
angle, and it actually is a result of the way that IPS technology works. So
moving back from the screen a small amount or looking at the screen deadon
by moving your head to the side rather than turning to the side should mostly
solve this problem and tell you whether you're dealing with IPS glow or
backlight bleed. And the only way to avoid IPS glow is to make sure that you
read user reviews and see if other people are complaining about excessive
glow on the model that you're looking at. Okay. Okay, then what if you've got
light splotches on your screen that clearly aren't backlight bleed or IPS
glow and look worse when your screen is very dark? This one is called clouding
and is usually a result of a physically damaged screen that was stored or
transported improperly. There isn't much you can do about it once it happens. So,
make sure you're handling your display with care or get a prompt replacement if
your monitor is new. Which leads us finally, speaking of things you can't
reverse, beware of this one, to burnin,
which can happen if you display the same static image on your screen for a long,
long time. You'll see this often in public places like restaurants or
airports that often have things like a channel logo burned into the corner of
the screen or a grid that has constantly changing information in the cells, but
not in the lines themselves. Now, although burn-in is less common on
modern flat panels than on older CRTs and can sometimes actually be fixed in
more moderate cases, long-term burn-in can still permanently damage your
monitor. So, unless you want to see the ghosts of computing sessions past every
time you sit down in front of your display, it is worthwhile to turn it off
when you're not using it or at the very least run a screen saver. So, I hope
this summary helped, but I also don't want to scare you guys because even with
the army of problems that you can face as a monitor owner, most of them can be
avoided simply by doing your homework before buying, returning defective units
on time if there is a problem, and by taking care of it after you buy it.
After all, I shouldn't have to tell you guys not to have cat agility contests or
BB gun fights in the same room where you keep your $1,000 ultrawide. Though, of
course, if you are the kind of person who doesn't know those kinds of things
on their own, maybe you should do some learning. Maybe head over to linda.com.
With a linda.com membership, you can watch and learn from top experts who are
passionate about teaching in all kinds of fields, whether it's business or
productivity applications or uh video editing or photography. You can take
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own pace. And it's got they've got so many great tools, many of which have
been added since we originally started doing these spots forlinda.com. So now
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try it for free is head over to linda.com/techquicky.
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