Damaged CRT?

wchang99

Member
Jul 14, 2000
108
4
81
I have a Sony 21" Multiscan E540 (Trinitron) that hasn't been looking quite right lately.

1. It has a hazy, gray, low-contrast cast over it that's very noticeable right after it's been turned on, and even after warming up for 15-20 minutes (probably longer than any modern crt should take?), the haziness never entirely goes away.

The contrast is turned all the way up to 100, and the color temperature setting is correct -- the default. I usually have brightness turned all the way down to zero for this monitor.

2. There are a series of pencil-thin, bright, slightly wavy diagonal lines (maybe 15 degrees from the horizontal, ~1.5 inches apart, 8 or 9 in total, roughly parallel to each other) that cut across the otherwise hazy screen, that are always there. They probably move around ever so slightly, and do dance around when I degauss the monitor, but otherwise don't really move.

3. Maybe most damning is that when I push brightness up to 100, the screen actually goes BLACK. It does get progressively brighter and whiter as I push it up, but somewhere around 60 it kind of shuts down to black. And, going back down in the other direction to zero, it's actually not until around 25 that the image pops back from black (instead of around 60) -- a delayed effect for the image to pop back from black. This makes me think there's some component that's taxed or damaged. (This isn't normal behavior for a brightness control, right?)

It's not that old a monitor, about 5 years. It was holding up well until around when we had a bunch of nasty power interruptions in quick succession, each time zapping the monitor off and on, off and on again, before I guess some components inside could react. I'm suspecting this is the cause, but does that make any sense?

Also, is the screen going black with brightness at 100 a dead giveaway that something's damaged, as opposed to general age?

Many thanks! Any help appreciated.
 
Apr 20, 2008
10,067
990
126
Oh dear. I had the same monitor up until two years back.

I guess its prone to this. I had multiple dead horizontal lines going across my screen, as well as it couldn't show colors very well anymore. The screen would always be way darker than it should have been and upping the contrast seemed to just make it worse. Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap $120 LCD from newegg. You really don't know how bad it is until you replace it.
 

wchang99

Member
Jul 14, 2000
108
4
81
Thanks for the replies, everyone --

@clandren -- we're kind of cheap, though, don't really upgrade that often. And, it was sort of top of the line at the time (at least for consumer level monitors), so we're going to try to hold on to it if we can.

@Scholzpdx -- thanks, I wasn't sure if it was just me or something out of the ordinary, but it is good to know that other people have run across this before. What you described sounds a lot like what I have -- it is really killing my eyes when it's looking bad. I think I will try Modelworks' suggestion as a last ditch effort before replacing it -- but, thanks.

I ran across this term, retrace lines visible -- it's pretty much what I have; don't know if it's what you had?

@Modelworks -- that WinDAS and cable method looks *really* good -- I will have to read up on it a little more (thanks for the forum link as well). I guess this sort of fix is what I was hoping for -- it didn't make sense to me that the monitor would just go qualitatively bad like that, but I didn't know that such a solution existed (obviously). Thanks again.
 
Apr 20, 2008
10,067
990
126
The lines were not really like that. The were black bars, horizontal. Wasn't that just a bad, bad day when i noticed it. Hopefully you can get it fixed. If not, take my suggestion and upgrade to a DVI enabled LCD montior. The only thing you would ever have to worry about is the back light blowing out or a stuck pixel. Both of which are highly unlikely.