LCD Monitors Dying?

Thanatos

So, this is the first office I've worked at where we've had LCD monitors for a substantial length of time. They seem to be dying out over the past few months, though, and typically go in the way that it takes them several minutes to "warm up" when you turn them on initially, but then they're generally fine for the rest of the day. Is this typical of a dying LCD? What's the typical halflife of an office LCD (i.e. one that's used 8 hours a day)? Are these actually dying, or is there something I can do to fix them?

End

It sounds like you might be having issues with the backlights, but it's hard for me to guess at it for more than that.

Fats

Warm up as in get brighter? That's normal for CCFL backlit screens, it's perhaps a sign of age but not of death.

Edit: Typical backlight lifespan in a quality modern monitor is 60,000+ hours.

Thanatos

"Warm up" as in "be at all legible." The one on my computer, in particular, has lines of distorted light across it but is mostly off for about two minutes or so rather than anything visible, and then starts working just fine afterwards. It had the same problem on another computer it was attached to (and my old monitor was just fine). If it goes on standby, it does the same thing.

There's no way there's anywhere near 60,000 hours on any of these.

Fats

Ah, yeah, that's a problem. I don't know enough about LCD internals to say whether it'll die or not, but something is definitely broken.

Thanatos

This is happening with a lot of our monitors, too. Seems like weird behavior to me, but I'm certainly not an expert.

symbolsor

Are the monitors still covered under warranty? It's probably worth trying to RMA it. I've heard of people taking them apart to fix capacitors.. but that might not even be the problem.

Something similar is happening to mine. When there's been inactivity and I turn it on, it just blinks on and off. I can see the desktop when it turns on but then it turns off again like it can't find the signal. I don't see any warping or lines of distorted light though. It still works after a few minutes though. It's been like this for a week or so.

Thanatos

None of them are covered under warranty. Mine has been doing this for a few months without going out, so I don't even know that it's an issue of them dying or anything, but it's not really something we can have them doing in an office. Just seems weird.

matt has a problem

If your work bought them all from the same manufacturer, at the same time, they probably all came from the same lot, meaning they all had parts from their respective same lots, and it's not uncommon to find a batch where they all have the same bad parts. There was a flurry of motherboard capacitor failures a year or so ago, due to a bad lot of capacitors from China.

Eeveelution

What brand of LCD are you guys using?

Recently my LG just died out of no where. I mean I went to bed, turned it off, woke up the next morning for some more diablo 2 loving, no life at all in the computer.

A lot of LCD's have a 3 year warranty so I figured I would ask.

Perhaps its just built in to eventually die. (If everything worked forever, we'd have no market).

Ruckus

Most monitors have a manufacture date on them, usually Month/Year. So far the average lifespan of the LCD monitors I've observed in an office environment is ~7 years.

If yours are failing significantly sooner, it could be a number of reasons:

Low Quality/Cheap Monitors
Bad batch of LCD's
Bad batch of Power Supplies in the monitor
Mains power slightly out of phase, slightly low voltage, or slightly high voltage.
Above normal operating environment temperature (23 Celcius+)