LCD Color Corrector?

colorContrast asks: " I've currently got a Viewsonic VG700b, and as of recent, it has been giving me some trouble. Instead of showing real black, i'm now getting a red hue for black, and the pixels on the screen have become more pronounced than they used to be. The odd thing is that when I brought my monitor home over vacation, the problem was fixed for a short while, but now it appears to be broken again. Does anyone have any suggestions on if its time to get a new LCD, or if they know of a fix for this problem? (I have attempted to manually correct it by changing the colors but that did little.)"

bad cable?

[dnamaners]

Sounds like the exact problem had with an old CTR, it when all green. In the end it turned out to be a shorted cable, if you bent it one way it would go normal again. A new cable fixed that. I bet your A.) are using a 25 pin sub-D cable and B.) its cable (or its plug) has gone bad. The fact that it "got better" for some time may indicate this. Check it out.

Many options

[dr00g911]

Sounds to me like how my screen looks when the VGA cable gets knocked a little out of whack with the video card. It might be a short in the monitor cable as well.

Don't think I've ever seen an LCD panel drift in color unless it was a cabling issue. CRTs, on the other hand, generally either drift to red or green as they die in my experience.

There's lots of software-based gamma/color correction fixes that you can apply to the monitor depending on your OS. The 'advanced' display driver panel should have some color/gamma adjustments if you've got an nVidia or ATI card under Win, and there's a big ass "calibrate" button on your display preference pane on the Mac that'll let you get stuff back in whack.

If you're running any Adobe apps under Win or Mac OS 9, there's the Adobe Gamma control panel -- which I personally used when I had an old CRT that decided to go pink and dark on me.

When you start talking calibration hardware, on the other hand, you're starting to talk about stuff like the Gretag-Macbeth EyeOne series or a Spider, which are probably more pricey than the new LCD you've got your eye on.

Re:bad cable?

[Bistronaut]

I've had problems with even "good" (though poorly shielded) cables just being near power cables or other sources of electromagnetic noise. If DVI is possible with your monitor/video card, try that.

Calibrate your monitors!!!

[Lord Satri]

Any computer user would be **surprised** the difference is makes to calibrate your monitors (thus creating an ICC profile). It allows you to synchronize your monitors, scanners, printers, etc. It works better with macs, but also works with windows (I'm in the process of making it work with Debian).

Read more here:
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/monitor_calibra tion_tools.htm [drycreekphoto.com]
http://www.chromix.com/ColorGear/Shop/productdetai l.cxsa?toolid=1086&num=37&fnd=nfound&refcode=cmmea sure&PID=11713 [chromix.com]

and of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICC_profile [wikipedia.org]

Re:Don't bother.

[spectre_240sx]

A hardware calibration device, along with decent software, will make your life much easier. One thing to remember is that you'll have trouble replicating the output of any active display on print. It doesn't matter whether it's CRT or LCD. You have to match the display to the gamut of the printer in order to have a seemless workflow.

don't photo-edit with a CRT either

[r00t]

Try your CRT on a monitor test [uml.edu] and see how bad it really is.

Eeeeew. You want to edit photos with that ???

Re:newish product- pantone huey..

[TheGratefulNet]

note: this MAY be a dongle. you MIGHT need it connected at all times, for the profiling to work.

still not clear, but some language in the company advertising indicates that you need to always have this connected - and not just to get ambient light, either.

I have the monaco optix xr and I use it on XP (sigh). but since I use vnc viewer on XP (works really well as a viewer platform) - and then my vncserver runs on freebsd - I have color profiling on all apps that start on bsd (or linux or solaris or ...) and send their output back to the vnc-viewer. that way I can profile/calibrate my screen 'properly' (windows tools - but they DO work) - and yet still get good clean color on all my x11 apps. its a nice side-effect.

here's a link to my dell 24" lcd being calibrated by the optix xr 'puck':

http://www.flickr.com/ [flickr.com] photos/ linux-works /sets/ 72057594053570317/

(note that the url above does NOT have any embedded spaces in it)

I can recommend the optix xr but the phooey, I'm not quite sure about yet. if it has a similar 'site license' like monaco does, fine. if its 'one pc, one dongle' then thanks but no thanks.

display troubleshooting

[lnlypaladin]

Something to keep in mind when you're troubleshooting something is not to make assumptions, if you are going to rule out a possibility, make sure the reason for doing so is based on solid, non-circular reasoning, logical and valid. Also keep in mind that several things in a computer work together to make something happen, so just because the monitor is where you first see the evidence that something is wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that the monitor itself is the problem.

In this case, if you have the extra equipment, you might want to try and switch the LCD with another monitor which you know for sure is working fine and see if the same problem shows up. If the problem is there with the second monitor which you know works when plugged into another system, the monitor is probably not the problem. Keep in mind that if the problem doesn't show up in the second monitor that it doesn't rule out driver problems, different monitors use different drivers unless you leave them on the defaults, and even then if the monitor has different capabilities, the operating system might be using a different driver for it. This part of my comment is obviously targeted mainly towards Windows which will attempt to find the 'best' driver for a device with minimal interaction with the user.

The fact that the monitor worked fine when you took it home and plugged it into a different system (I'm assuming this is the case) suggests to me that it is more likely maybe the cord, a port, video drivers, other display software, video card, some outside influence on the LCD, or, worst case scenario, the port or controller on your motherboard which deals with the video card.

Hence, if you have an extra cord you can swap in, see if it makes a difference.

Download and install the latest video drivers for your hardware to make sure the drivers aren't the problem.

Do you have a video color or gamma correction program running? i.e. for a printer or graphics software (I know adobe has one, several printer manufacturers have their own). If so see what happens when you disable it, perhaps it's not configured correctly.

Did you change your video resolution? Some video cards will have unanticipated distortion when you change resolution, though it's usually with older video cards and also usually the brightness and contrast which are changed, not color hue, it's worth switching resolutions a couple times to make sure.

If it was a CRT I would tell you to make sure you didn't have magnets, speakers, or other unshielded electronics right next to it, but magnets don't seem to affect an LCD like they do a CRT. I don't know what prolonged exposure might do to them, but just putting a magnet up to an lcd usually won't distort the display like it will with a crt. Never the less, see what happens if you move your monitor to a different part of your desk, away from other electronics, the wall, power ports, again, nothing lost in trying and if it's environmental interference, it can be the hardest to pinpoint.