Bought used Eizo 19" LCD, it's kinda dim

Muse

Lifer
Jul 11, 2001
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My old Planar PX191 19" LCD display stopped turning on a week ago. I took it apart but found no obvious bad looking capacitors, so I figured it was just dead.

I go on ebay and find a guy selling a bunch of standless Eizo Flexscan L788 19" LCD displays (VESA mountable), so I buy one and it came yesterday. It seems great until you turn it on. No stuck pixels, but it's pretty dim, but worse, it's really hard to adjust the colors to acceptable values. Off the bat it was very yellow. I reset it to defaults and I was shocked at how yellowish it remained (it was probably reset by the seller, I figure).

It's my secondary display on my desktop system (whose primary display is a pretty new Samsung SyncMaster SA350 23" LED/LCD). The stark contrast between the images of the two displays side by side had me trying hard to tweak the Eizo 19" last night, but I couldn't do much with it. This morning I managed to tweak it to not so bad values tweaking the Red/Green/Blue gain control:

Red: 61%
Green: 74%
Blue: 100%

Now, I am total green blind (a type of color blindness in which I lack any green cones in my eyes), so my sense of good color rendition is suspect at best, however I know what looks to me awful. Whites on this thing untweaked are quite yellow and it's as though I had sunglasses on.

The brightness and contrast are set to the default levels: 100%. Now, my other monitors are WAY brighter than this one, and I have to turn the brightness way down on them. This Eizo is barely acceptable at maximum brightness, and this is in a room that's generally pretty badly lit. In the Information applet in the on screen control it says it has 15866 hours on it. The back of the monitor indicates 2005. Seems like it was On (not asleep) for 8 hours/day virtually every working day since it was manufactured until this year, just doing simple arithmetic with that 15866 hours value.

I was really hopeful I'd really love this. It does have dual DVI inputs, which is cool cause I can hook my server up to it and have DVI sharpness. I can maybe live with it at this brightness, but if it dims much at all it will be not so hot. My best tweaks don't have it looking like my primary display, but it's not night and day different, just different at this point, not so noticeable.

I have another great looking dual display setup in another room running on a laptop: 23" primary, 19" secondary (Acer S231HL bid 23-Inch Widescreen Ultra-Slim LED, Hyundai ImageQuest L90D+ 19" LCD Monitor). The images between the displays are virtually the same, no issue for me. This setup I just worked up is far from that. OK, can I maybe replace the back light or something? :confused:
 
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