Topic: Weird colors showing up on new LCD

[W7RE]

First off this isn't my LCD. Mine is awesome. (thanks again for the LCD resource link Pug)

My dad bought a 24" LCD recently, I'm not sure of the model but the brand is Sceptre. He's noticed that when he starts his computer up, he gets these scattered green pixels across the image on his desktop. (Well, they were green when he showed me, I'm not sure if they always are.) He opened up a folder that contained images, and all the thumbnails had the same thing. He reached up and turned the monitor off, then back on, and they went away.

I thought maybe it was some issue with windows initializing the monitor on bootup, and that maybe it wouldn't show up if he let the system boot up before turning the monitor on. He's had the computer on all day though, with the monitor off. So we thought maybe the monitor has to "warm up" and then turning it off and back on fixes it. I did do some digging, and found this post through a google search. I'm not sure that's the same monitor, but it's not the same problem. However, the guy has the same question about the driver file that my dad had, and which is basically "is that it? there isn't more to it?".


OK, so could it be that it just needs to "warm up"? If so, is this common in cheaper LCDs, or should he start trying to send it back? I don't know anything about Sceptre, but I'm assuming it's a cheap LCD because it's a 24" and he paid less than $250 for it new, and I just got mine and was worried I'd be sacrificing quality for price by paying $350 for a 22".

[scottws]

My guess is one of two things.  Drivers need to be updated, video (and monitor, if possible).

Sceptres are a pretty crappy brand though.  I wouldn't be surprised if the monitor was just bad.

[W7RE]

Well, he went to the Sceeptre website and they had a driver to download, but when he tried to update the driver and pointed to the downloaded file it told him that it found no newer drivers than the default ones it found the first time he plugged it in. His video card is a GeForce4 Ti4400 and he says he's never updated the drivers lol. (it's a dell, so it came pre-installed)

[scottws]

Wow that thing's a relic.  Well, drivers around the 23.11 Detonator series should be good for that card.  I think that's the driver that topped out the N20 core.

[Cobra951]

Seems to me like pixels are getting temporarily stuck.  This can happen in LCD monitors, but it's more or less permanent.  I had not heard of pixels that get stuck for a while, then can be activated again with a monitor power cycle.  Unless I'm not getting the right picture here, it doesn't seem to me that drivers would have anything to do with that.  It's more likely a hardware issue, and perhaps the monitor should be exchanged.  For a 24" monitor, $250 is probably too dirt cheap.  You get what you pay for, most of the time anyway.

You do mean individual pixels, right?  Not blobs or big blocks of color?  That would more likely be a software (driver or firmware) issue.

[W7RE]

It's individual pixels, but it seems to be dependant on the picture. You can change the image that you're displaying, and a completely different set of pixels will be green. Fore xample my dad showed me a picture of our dog, and there were very few pixels that were green, in the area around the top of the dog's head and ears (which have black fur). He then changed it to a landscape looking over a town and the green pixels were mostly in the area of the town, but not in the trees and bushes that framed the picture. When he opened the folder with the image thumbnails, the green pixels were only in the thumbnails, not in the rest of the window.

He installed the newest drivers and we'll wait and see if it still does it. He doesn't use the computer that often and we'll be out of town tomorrow, so it may be a couple days before we know if the new drivers fixed it.

[Cobra951]

OK, then I would be a small amount of money that what's happening is that certain pixel data values are making borderline LCD pixels go to a bad state.  A warmup will clear that up, but I would not trust this to work for the decent lifespan a monitor should have.

[W7RE]

Updating the video card drivers seems to have fixed it. Time will tell.