Gadgetory

so your new monitor finally arrived and you're super excited to play games at 4k or watch tech quickie on a screen that's big enough to let you spot that weird growth on my chin that sorry anyway so you plug in your new display but something doesn't seem right is there something wrong with it or do you just need to adjust some dials while it's true that many new monitors could use some adjustments called calibration to look their best defects out of the box are unfortunately not that uncommon so what should you be looking for on both new displays as well as your existing display after you've been using it for a while well one relatively straightforward thing you can check for is dead or stuck pixels this is as easy as throwing up a little application called dead pixel body on your screen and cycling through all the different colors looking for any small points that are black or displaying the wrong color this can happen due to defects in the manufacturing process or even from touching your screen too roughly if you've owned your monitor for some time stuck pixels can sometimes be fixed with gentle pressure from something soft like a pencil eraser or with freely available utilities that flash many colors per second on the spot where you're stuck pixel is dead pixels however are usually dead for good so check to see if your monitor is still under warranty and what the dead pixel terms of your warranty are some manufacturers need like five in one spot in order to qualify but what if your pixels all look okay but you're noticing areas that are strangely brighter than the rest of the screen well if these areas are toward the corners or the edges you could be suffering from bleeding which doesn't say blood loss I'm talking of course about backlight bleeding which happens because modern flat panel displays with the exception of Oh loads work by shining a strong backlight through a liquid crystal display panel to create an image oftentimes this backlight is not completely blocked from leaking around the outsides of the LCD by the screen bezel this results in that backlight bleed that causes that lightness around the edges now I do have some bad news about backlight bleed and that is that the best way to avoid it is simply to buy a higher quality display with higher manufacturing standards as there's pretty much nothing you can do to fix it yourself although some intrepid do-it-yourselfers have tried dismantling their monitors and sealing the edges of the LCD with electrical tape but if you have an IPS panel make sure that you are not confusing backlight bleed with an effect that many have called IPS glow this is a glow that's present on some parts of IPS screens especially when you view dark images at an off angle and it actually is a result of the way that IPS technology works so moving back from the screen a small amount or looking at the screen dead-on by moving your head to the side rather than turning to the side should mostly solve this problem and tell you whether you're dealing with IPS glow or backlight bleed and the only way to avoid IPS glow is to make sure that you read user reviews and see if other people are complaining about excessive glow on the model that you're looking at okay then what if you've got light splotches on your screen that clearly aren't backlight lead or IPS glow and look worse when your screen is very dark this one is called clouding and is usually a result of a physically damaged screen that was stored or transported improperly there isn't much you can do about it once it happens so make sure you're handling your display with care or get a prompt replacement if your monitor is new which leads us finally speaking of things you can't reverse be aware of this one to burn in which can happen if you display the same static image on your screen for a long long time you'll see this often in public places like restaurants or airports that often have things like a channel logo burned into the corner of the screen or a grid that has constantly changing information in the cells but not in the lines themselves now although burnin is less common on modern flat panels than on older CRTs and can sometimes actually be fixed in more moderate cases long-term burnin can still permanently damage your monitor so unless you want to see the ghosts of computing sessions passed every time you sit down in front of your display it is worthwhile to turn it off when you're not using it or at the very least run a screen saver so I hope this summary helped but I also don't want to scare you guys because even with the army of problems that you can face as a monitor owner most of them can be avoided simply by doing your homework before buying returning defective units on time if there is a problem and by taking care of it after you buy it after all I shouldn't have to tell you guys not to have cat agility contests or BB gun fights in the same room where you keep your thousand dollar ultra-wide though of course if you are the kind of person who doesn't know those kinds of things on their own maybe you should do some learning maybe head over to lynda.com with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching in all kinds of fields whether it's business or productivity applications or video editing or photography you can take your hobby or even your career to the next level and you can do it at your own pace and it spot they've got so many great tools on many of which have been added since we originally started doing these spots for lynda.com so now you can browse the course transcripts to follow along or you can search for an answer and then skip to that point in the video you can take notes as you go and refer to them later you can download the tutorials and watch them on the goal including on your iOS or Android device you can create and save playlists of courses that you want to watch or customize your Learning Path to share with your friends and colleagues and team members and all you've got to do to try it for free yes my friends try it for free its head over to lynda.com slash tech quickie after your ten day free trial if you kind of go wow this is really great I'm learning so much then at a flat rate starting at just 25 bucks a month you can become a lynda.com member and start taking your mind to the next level too a or at least 10 days from today I mean you could start today but you pay later you guys understand so thanks for watching guys if you liked the video do this thing if you just like to do the other thing if you want to check out our other channels do that thing if you want to leave a comment with video suggestions do the other thing and if you want to subscribe and follow please do that thing thank you bye