It's been quite an exciting afternoon here at PC Magazine. Our commerce producer, Arielle Rochette was hard at work when suddenly her monitor went crazy! As you can see in the image at left (click to enlarge), it looks like someone took a bite out of her screen!
When she had more than one program displayed, the whole screen would jiggle back and forth enough to induce motion sickness. Unfortunately, the video I took didn't capture the action.
The funniest part: she was still able to work through all this. She sent an IM to Whitney, another producer, "you have to see this!" Arielle was also able to log a helpdesk ticket. It read: "My monitor has a deep wavy margin effect."
By the time our IT guy, Mel, arrived, the monitor began smoking! He quickly unplugged the mad monitor (we think it was smoking crack, possibly) and replaced it with a sleek flat screen display.
I tried to convince him that my CRT was smoking as well, but he didn't buy it.
Has this happened to anyone else out there? Any ideas, theories. . . Possible relation to Dell's exploding laptop?
See more images of this doped up display.
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September 14, 2006 4:21 PM
and by CRT, I don't just mean the battery is dying, it looks like the cathode ray tube under the hood of the monitor is dying a horrible horrible demagnetizing death. Could just be out of sync and not firing properly and need to be calibrated, but it doesn't look like a signal reception problem, it really does look like a problem or obstruction between the "gun" and the backside of your screen. Or perhaps a really cool effect used to get a swanky LCD! Sneaky sneaky!
September 15, 2006 1:14 AM
As someone who used to own a business repairing consumer electronics and computer monitors (back when there was the slimmest hope of a profit) it seems pretty clear that the CRT is merely displaying the effects of a fault in another part of the monitor. Usually on old monitors either the horizontal retrace circuit has failed or the "flyback transformer" which creates the high voltage (25kVdc to 30kVdc) for the CRT has/is failing. Horizontal sections in TVs and CRT monitors fail frequently because of the frequency and the high voltage required to operate. The frequency will be higher for increasingly higher resolutions and the voltage will be incrementally higher for larger CRTs. In my case, I run 1280x1024 with a 75Hz refresh that translates to 80kHz horizontal frequency (or 80,000 times a second that the scan line moves left to right and back again every second!) including "overscan" in the vertical area. Too much info? :-) I agree with Phoenix that it is a great way to upgrade one's display, but I don't think we can blame the laptop battery effect on this - of course, some greedy class-action lawyer may say otherwise!
September 16, 2006 1:11 PM
This looks like the high-power section that controls the electron gun is dying. This area used to be referred to as the "yoke" since it physically sits around the CRT area. Time to take it out back and shoot it.