My monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 940B that I bought at the end of June. While scrolling through these forums, I noticed a persistent pinkish dot about four inches to the right and five inches from the bottom of the screen. Remembering previous heart-stopping moments like these, I tried to wipe it off. No dice. Called up the DOS prompt to get a quick black screen, and there it was: a constant red pixel. After a few seconds of panicking, I tapped the screen lightly and it was gone.
This is the first LCD I’ve owned, so I don’t have a whole lot of experience to draw upon. Will this red pixel be back, or have I seen the last of it?
That’s a Pixel going bad. Every manufacturer has it’s own criteria for a defective screen. Some allow as little as 5-9 pixels, some 20 or more. You need to check with Samsung to see how many pixels they allow before a LCD is considered defective.
Chances are it will be back and you might have a few more over time. It’s the nature of the beast that LCD pixels go bad.
I LIVE WITH IT. If you can get over yourself, you will soon not even notice it.
If, however, you are sufficiently anal, you could easily drive yourself INSANE at the insolence of that ONE TINY PINK DOT that JUST WON’T GO AWAY.
Your choice…
Note that the one bad one has not multiplied, and my other monitor has no bad ones, so it’s not a given that it’ll get worse. They’re both Samsung 19" 1280x1024 models.
When I first saw the thread title, I thought you were talking about Armadillo Aerospace’s entry in the X-Prize Cup, which was a rocket named Pixel… what else would Carmack name it? ;-)
I came here expecting to hear that he’d finally been driven over the edge by Cave Story fanfic…
I wouldn’t worry too much about a single bad pixel, but location does matter a bit. Once of my office screens has a stuck red pixel that I only notice when there’s something with a black background in that area (like a command prompt or remote shell), but it would be a lot more annoying if it was a dead always-black pixel in an area that’s often solid white.
This LCD monitor is what my girlfriend and the kid use. The large black thumbprint-like pixel area is just what it looks like. Dead pixels. I keep telling her to buy a new one, she says it’s fine. It would drive me batshit crazy.
My personal experience with several stuck pixels has been that each has happened with a new monitor, and none of them ever came back. Most went away with a light press or rub, and one was more stubborn… that one I placed some tape over the spot and peeled it off (to pull rather than press on the surface) and it returned to normal.
Thanks, everyone, for the comments and suggestions. Special thanks to ciparis for providing the one optimistic nugget, on which I can pin all my hopes. In fact, Red Pixel made one more appearance late Saturday, but was yet again tapped into normality. I’ll put away the soldering iron and ball-peen hammer for now.
RichVR: Is there a reason why that mass of dead pixels is shaped like a thumb? Did someone try to anoint your monitor?
Since the monitor was brought home from the kid’s job, I’m guessing it’s from a thumb. He had to have an LCD monitor and so the thumbprint wasn’t an issue. Like I said, I wouldn’t be able to use the monitor at all. But he says it’s okay and the g/f doesn’t seem to mind…
One thing I explained to them was that if they expect me to do ANY work on their system, they will be hooking up a CRT to it first.
