How do I check a LCD for dead pixels?

I just got a laptop. I want to check for dead / stuck pixels. Is there a good program for this? (I figure it is just a slide show of all white / RGB/ black screens)
thanks,

Brian

That’s Exactly correct. total black or white should expose any bad pixels. try a blank word document for white

www.monitorsdirect.com has a little thing that runs through solid white, red, green, blue, and black screens for this purpose. Their site isn’t responding for me, though, so I can’t provide a direct link. A Word document won’t let you examine stuff around the edges. I suppose you could use a paint program to make images, though.

I grabbed the program from http://www.dps.uk.com/freeware_DTP.htm

anything I found was fixed by touching the screen (not sure if I was wiping off dust or “massaging” the LCD)

Brian

You on Windows? Using Internet Explorer?

Turn off all the toolbars (address, toolbar, etc).

Press Ctrl-L (the keystroke to open a URL if you don’t have the address bar handy. And you don’t have it handy, because some joker just made you turn it off in the last step.)

Type “about<colon>blank” into the dialog, and hit OK. The SDMB message board seems to have an issue with colons in the middle of words. (This is the trick to get I.E. to open a blank window. Obvious, eh?).

Hit F11. Viola! (Full screen mode, useless for everything except this.)

You’ll be able to see everything except a row of buttons at the top. You can hide those, too, by right-clicking on them and hitting “auto-hide”, if you care. Hit F11 again when you’re bored.

You can skip this step, fullscreen mode hides them for you, anyway.

Go to paintbrush and make a big black square.

      • I bought parts for a new PC a while back including dual 19" Viewsonic CRT monitors, and one of them has a dead pixel near the center. How common is this with CRT’s? I was not aware that it was a major problem. …I was kind of split between wanting to send it back and get another one, and just using it as the secondary and living with it… -and then when I looked on the seller’s site, they no longer carried this particular item number anymore anyway. So I just kept it, use it as the secondary.
        ~

I was told by the guy at the computer store that most monitors have dead pixels.

I don’t think that dead pixels are all that rare. I was checking out a few LCD monitors on NewEgg the other day and found out that some manufacturers won’t consider taking back a monitor for warranty repair or replacement unless it has 8 or more dead pixels. I thought that seemed like a high number, but maybe that’s not uncommon.

I just went through this recently. I bought a beautiful Samsung 19 inch lcd, got home and it had a few dead pixels. Took it back to the store and was informed that anything less then 6 pixels in considered to be within manufacturing tolerances, and not defective. A few death threats later I was given a new one, that only ended up having one dead pixel. I obsessed on it for about a week, but after 90% of my friends with the very LCDS I had been admiring told me they all had dead pixels, I learned to live with my screen. To be honest I haven’t even thought about that dead pixel in weeks.

I just went through this recently. I bought a beautiful Samsung 19 inch lcd, got home and it had a few dead pixels. Took it back to the store and was informed that anything less then 6 pixels in considered to be within manufacturing tolerances, and not defective. A few death threats later I was given a new one, that only ended up having one dead pixel. I obsessed on it for about a week, but after 90% of my friends with the very LCDS I had been admiring told me they all had dead pixels, I learned to live with my screen. To be honest I haven’t even thought about that dead pixel in weeks.

When I bought my toshiba laptop it had a dead pixel right in the midde of screen. Oddly enough, after a few weeks, it went away on its own. I understand that sometimes phyiscal pressure on the pixel (ie, massaging the screen) can fix it, as was hinted at by N9IWP.

Every LCD screen has some dead pixels because of the way they are constructed. For each pixel, individual transistors are needed. It would be cost-prohibitive to make an absolutely 100% perfect LCD display, since there most surely will be a few bad transistors in the bunch. This is not to say that there is no quality control - in fact, up to 40% of monitors are thrown out for having way too many flawed transistors.

Thanks! This is also a very good way to see just how dirty your monitor is.
As far as I can tell - no dead pixels. Our first LCD monitor had a really obvious dead pixel right in the middle. The monitor didn’t last long anyway so it wasn’t big problem.

[leaves to go clean filthy monitor]

There are four classes of TFTs. See http://www.aria.co.uk/tft-dead-pixel-info.asp

Mil-spec is Class I, consumer is Class II.

I recently read somewhere that one manufacturer (Sony, I think) now guarantees zero dead pixels.

Planar used to (probably still does) guarantee no dead pixels. And ZebraShaSha’s claim that they all do isn’t generally accurate. Of the five LCD screens I own, four are flawless, and one has a single stuck pixel. Not a dead one in the bunch. Most LCD monitors I’ve seen made in the last year or so don’t have any.

For Mac OSX

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11661