Monitor Damage

August 9, 2007 8:32 PM

Could putting pressure on the screen of an LCD monitor cause damage?

I have a Dell LCD flat panel monitor. It worked wonderfully from the time I started using it. I never had a problem with color displaying incorrectly or dead pixels, or anything. More recently, I've picked it up (to move it) and, in doing so, applied pressure directly to the screen. After I had done this a few times, I started noticing colored lines (comprised of dots mostly) across the screen, both when I'm online and when I'm working offline in Photoshop, etc. If this happens when I'm online, I can just scroll down, and when I scroll back up, the lines are gone. But, when they appear in Photoshop, they tend to burn themselves into the image I'm working on, and I have to repair that part of the image. These lines never seem to appear on my desktop, though.

Basically, I'm wondering if pressing into the screen has caused this damage. Also, is there anyway to reverse the damage?

posted by Mael Oui to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Umm, yes, I broke my laptop LCD screen this way, seriously like 2 weeks ago. An LCD is made up of several thin layers of glass/crystals and it's easy to crack one of those layers through direct pressure. I did it exactly the same way you described, by carelessly picking up the laptop by the LCD screen- it turned slightly in my hand and my thumb born the full wieght of the laptop directly on the screen. Poof- 1/4 of the screen was stuck with white/red/blue/yellow vertical lines so that you couldnt even read it.

There's no way to fix that other than replacing the screen- you cant really replace the little glass layers. Luckily mine was under extended warranty and Best Buy fixed it, I just got it back yesterday (yay!). I hope yours has a warranty too!
posted by T.D. Strange at 8:47 PM on August 9, 2007

Pressing on the screen can damage it, but there's no way it would affect behavior of running programs. By which I mean it could not possibly become part of an image you were working on.

If the screen has been damaged, there's pretty much no way to fix it.

The best way to see if your screen is damaged is to display a uniform middle-gray image (i.e. #808080). Virtually all damage is full-on or full-off and both of those will show up clearly against a gray image. Damage can manifest as individual pixels being bad, or as horizontal lines, or as vertical lines.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:48 PM on August 9, 2007

The lines from your possibly damaged monitor "burn themselves into the image" you're working on in Photoshop? Are you sure? Cuz that is sorta crazy talk. A monitor is just a device for displaying information. It doesn't change your files. I promise.

It sounds like perhaps something has gone wonky with the way your system software is displaying windows. It may be that when you scroll in a browser, or paint in Photoshop, the window refreshes and the funky pixels get redrawn properly. If you have some sort of system repair utility, I'd try running that and see what comes of it.

Knowing what OS you are running may help others to better troubleshoot your problem.
posted by thinman at 9:00 PM on August 9, 2007

LCD's are two glass plates separated by a thin layer of liquid crystal goo. On one of the pieces of glas are all the transistor elements, on the other are the little red, green, and blue dyed squared that give the three subpixels of any given pixel their color.

The transistor is formed by layer metals and insulators on top on one another, so the surface of the glass with the transistors on it has a lot of very thin electrical conductors piled on top of one another separated only by a thin insulator. This is how they build the transistor for each subpixel.


The liquid crystal goo provides no support, so to keep the two pieces of glass exactly parallel across their entire surface, and to preven the glass from sagging down and crushing the transistor layers, when they make these displays, there are little pillars or beads of resin in the tiny thin black area between pixels. These beads or pillars provide the structural support that keeps the two glass surfaces separated and parallel.

Driving the display, or painting the screen is accomplished by powering up a row (horizontal line), activating the columns that need activating by an amount corresponding to the brightness of the pixel, waiting a bit, powering down the horizontal row, and then proceeding to the next row and repeating. The single electrical conductor for the entire row passes under the transistor layers for every one of the pixels in that row.

Now to your problem. Depending on the amount of force you may have

(a) done nothing - not likely because you are seeing a problem
(b) you crushed or cracked some of the resin pillars in those pixels where you applied the force
(c) you pressed so hard you crushed the pillar but also crushed the transistor layers.

Because you are seeing lines, my guess is (c). You crushed the transistor layer, breaking some lines and shorting others Because the crushing would likely create a big mess, not clean breaks or permanent shorts. The problem is intermittent.

It doesn't make any sense that it would burn your image, though. The monitor is output only. No image info goes from the monitor back to the CPU.

If you scroll the image up and down in photoshop, does the problem behave the same as in your browser?
posted by Pastabagel at 9:11 PM on August 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

"But, when they appear in Photoshop, they tend to burn themselves into the image I'm working on, and I have to repair that part of the image. These lines never seem to appear on my desktop, though."


Are you sure about this? What I get from this is that when you are working in Photoshop the issue with your screen manipulates the image you are working on? Are you sure about this? Take your image and move it around. Does the mess move with the image?
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 9:18 PM on August 9, 2007

nth-ing the 'crazy talk' regarding pixels burning into your photoshop pictures. There is absolutely zero way for this to happen.... there simply isn't a flow of information in that direction.

You can prove this to yourself by opening a supposedly 'damaged' picture on another machine.
posted by foobario at 9:30 PM on August 9, 2007

If the 'damage' can be moved around the screen it sounds more like problems with either memory or the graphics card.
posted by malevolent at 12:10 AM on August 10, 2007

Aside from the Photoshop issue, yes, you can definitely damage your screen with pressure. I have a Dell flat-panel and the cat knocked it onto the floor. On the way down, the screen must have hit the edge of the desk, because I have a nice "bruise" running down one side of my monitor. (It looks exactly like a bruise - bluish-black marks with ill defined edges.)

To the photoshop issue - it never impacts any of my files or moves around. I always have the same bruise no matter what's on the screen.

I've had dark lines running across my screen in Firefox that sometimes go away when I scroll up/down. I don't think this has anything to do with the monitor bruising since it started long after the fall.
posted by desjardins at 5:54 AM on August 10, 2007

To everyone claiming that the file damage is crazy talk: well, it is, but it's not unreasonable to think that there is physical display damage which is intermittent, meaning that if he paints over those pixels a second time, sometimes they refresh and look normal.
posted by fake at 7:51 AM on August 10, 2007

@fake -

I agree, that is why I asked him to move the image around the screen. Like moving the scroll bar in his browser, this will refresh the pixels and should prove that the issue is not affecting his file.
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 8:07 AM on August 10, 2007

Ah.. thanks for the responses everyone! I feel a lot more educated about this beastly monitor now, and I'll double-check some of the things pointed out here. And, sorry, I'm running Win2k.

About the Photoshop issue: No, when I scroll away or refresh in Photoshop, the dots don't disappear as they do in the browser. When I move the image around, the line of dots do move with the image. They're not just on the screen.. They don't appear when I'm looking in a folder or have any program open. They're in images I have open in Photoshop (not every image), or I see them online. I mean, I'm not sure what's happening when I'm in Photoshop, and maybe 'burn' was the wrong word, but the basic process goes: I scan an image. There's no damage to the original picture or scanned image at all. It's opened in Photoshop. I just crop or straighten the images, and, at this point, sometimes the line of dots appears (exactly what I see when I'm online). The first time this happened, I didn't do anything to fix the dots, and after I saved the image and uploaded it, those dots were still there. In fact, I do have images online that have that line of dots, and people on other computers have confirmed seeing them there. I do agree that, logically, it doesn't make sense that this would transfer to the image.. but.. I don't know. I'm not sure what to call that, but it's surely happening.

Interesting point, malevolent. I never thought of memory or graphics card issues. I'll have to look into that!
posted by Mael Oui at 8:55 PM on August 10, 2007

If other people on other computers confirm seeing them, then they the problem really does exist in the files.

Can you point us to an example of a problem file you've uploaded to the Web?
posted by thinman at 4:35 PM on August 18, 2007