Afterimaging

November 9, 2004 3:12 PM

At work I have a fancy new big giant Apple cinema display. I like it. But I noticed that recently, since I changed my desktop picture to something near 50% grey, I get afterimages - for example, when I close illustrator after working on lineart, I see a ghost of the lineart on my desktop for 15-30 seconds. I thought it was my eyes but my cow-orkers see it too. Is this bad? Can I up the refresh rate on the screen or something? I don't like it.
posted by luriete to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

What is your display plugged into?
posted by Mwongozi at 4:39 PM on November 9, 2004

15-30 seconds is an insane amount of time for a display to be lagging by. Normally the display would refresh in something like 1/1000th of that time.

Are you sure it's not just a visual illusion -- can you take a picture of it (or a screenshot)? When the ghost goes away, does it happen suddenly or does it fade out over time? Does it happen with different background images -- say, all white or all black? Are there other parts of the screen which similarly don't get updated?
posted by xil at 4:57 PM on November 9, 2004

Response by poster: these are very pale afterimages but they bug me. I cannot take a screenshot of it because it's happening on substrate I think... However we took a polaroid of it and it was visible although the flash kind of screwed up the picture. It happens mostly in the middle of the screen. My machine is a dual 857 G4 graphite with about 1 gig of ram.
posted by luriete at 5:38 PM on November 9, 2004

You can't up the refresh rate because refresh rates on LCD monitors is static and unchangeable. But like xil said that's way too long a time. I suppose it's possible that if you used a really high resolution desktop image you're choking the graphics card for some reason. Can you change your desktop image back to what it was before?
posted by falconred at 6:05 PM on November 9, 2004