Monitor acting funny

[PetiteFlower]

I have a 17" Sony Trinitron monitor that's about 4 years old. Lately the picture has been getting darker for no apparant reason. Sometimes it will start out ok but get darker as I use it, but sometimes I turn it on in the morning and it's noticably darker then it should be. It's getting to the point where even turning the brightness up as high as it goes still isn't letting me see all the details in my pictures. Does this mean the thing is about to die? I hope not, it's a nice monitor and it's served me well, and I can't really afford a new one at the moment...

[Janak Parekh]

Most likely, yes. :( Monitors do wear out in about 5 years or so. CRTs, in particular, tend to "fade".

The good news is, monitors have gotten relatively cheap over the last few years. You can even get LCDs for relatively cheap (http://pocketpcthoughts.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=37).

--janak

[Darius Wey]

Most GPUs (in particular, those made by nVIDIA) come with a set of drivers that allow you to accurately configure your monitor's brightness, contrast, and colour reproduction to match a specific profile (in your case, that of the Sony Trinitron). You should give that a go, although it will only improve the fading scenario, not solve it.

FYI, I have a 19" Trinitron (G420) that is well over five years old, and I've not had any issues with "fading, darker" images. I guess I've been lucky.

[PetiteFlower]

Hm I do have a pretty spiffy video card, ATI 128 megs. So I'll give it a shot, though I don't really know where to look. I'll probably figure it out though.

I don't want to get a new monitor until I've at least gotten my full 5 years out of this one! But at least it's warning me. My last monitor died completely suddenly and I had to go buy a new one like that day!

[cml]

Trinitron's are kind of funny. The last one that I had did exactly what yours is doing after only about year (long enough to get by the warranty period, but not much longer). The 21" I currently have, though, has been running fine for about eight years and still looks better than anything else except the latest LCD screens. I never found a fix for my old one. I managed to continue to use it for several months, but it eventually faded to the point of wicked eye strain.

[PetiteFlower]

Well that just stinks. Maybe it's a known issue with a fix. I did find the video card brightness settings but that didn't work very well. I couldn't increase the brightness much without making the whole screen washed out (I think it was just a color-brightness control).

[ctmagnus]

I had a monitor do that. Then it eventually started turning itself off. That lasted a few weeks. Then it turned itself off and emitted a smokey smell. It never worked again.

It lasted close to eight years of near-daily use.

:cry:

Fortunately, I had received its replacement four days earlier.