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Monitor's settings too high?

Hi,

I have a 5 year old, Gateway VX900 19" CRT monitor and I was told that you should run your monitor at the maximum refresh rate, for that resolution. Will this damage my monitor or make it age faster? What about maximum brightness and contrast? Someone else told me that, "Running it at a lower or higher refresh rate will hurt it", "when they are too low (high frequency squeal)" and maximum brightness and contrast, "Just burns out the phosphorus faster." I believe the part about the phosphors, but, the frequency I'm not so sure of. Because I currently have it at 1024x768, 81kHz/100Hz, with maximum brightness and contrast, I usually have it at 1024x768, 38kHz/60Hz,

100% contrast and 50-75% brightness. I'm within the manufacturers specifications, 31-95 kHz/50-160 Hz. It looks better, and is faster/smoother, but, it looks a little blurry, but it's been getting a little blurry at some screen resolutions and frequencies lately.

Thanks, for all your help.

Reply to
js5895
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If you areadly have five years use on the monitor, it is likey approaching the end of its useful life, plus the refresh rate doesn't normally impact the lifetime of a monitor.

The critical thing is to stay within the scan rate of the monitor, otherwise you could theoretically cause damage to its deflection circuitry. This is pretty difficult to do unless you are running Unix, Linix, or one of its clones and set the scan parameters to some ridiculous extremes.

If the monitor is only display symptoms of being blurry, this is symptomatic of a montor with poor high-voltage regulation or a failing CRT, in which case the cost of repair would likely exceed the cost of a new monitor. Your probability of running into this problem is heavily dependent on the brand of monitor you use. Over the past years I've owed two generaric monitors that lasted only two years, then I move to the Sony multi-synch monitors which are good for about 5 years, and for the past 8 years I've been using a 19" Mistsubishii Diamond Pro 900u (which originally cost around $900 and is still going strong and sharp). When it fails to deliver performance (which it eventually will), my next monitor will be one of those flat-panel screens.

The point here is that unless you drastically exceed the scan rate parameters of of monitor, its useful life will not be noticably affected. By contrast, when you purchase an inexpensive (say Sanyo or something akin), expect a short useful lifetime for the device.

Hope this helps. Harry C.

Reply to
hhc314

Me I like Gateway, and this is a good quality, $600 monitor, also it's the only 19" monitor that I noticed with a low horizontal dot pitch of

0.22mm, and the picture is beautiful.
Reply to
js5895

I don't think scan rate will wear out the components any faster, and I have a hard time believing that phosphorus "burns out" at all. I'm using a 17" Sony Trinitron that my mom bought at least 8 years ago, if not more. I've been using it ever since I left for college, which was 4 years ago, which means its been running at max for at least that long.

I have to admit that I generally don't turn up the brightness or contrast too much, because I like the black on my screen to be true black. Maybe that's why its lasted so long. But Sony also simply makes great stuff.

--
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mehaase(at)sas(dot)upenn(dot)edu
Reply to
Mark Haase

Go take a look at a screen that's been displaying the same thing 24/7 for a few years, such as an industrial machine, or medical equipment. The image is "burned" into the screen as a darker "image", visible when the monitor is off.

Vertical scan collapse, on a TV or computer monitor screen will burn it in minutes. A stationary spot will do it in seconds. The old Schmitt system back-projection TVs had circuitry to kill the EHT and bias the CRT hard off in the event of a scan failure, since a stationary spot could melt the glass.

BTW, it's "phosphor", not "phosphorus", so called because it is phosphorescent. The element phosphorus does not need to be present. The original CRT phosphor back around the turn of the 19th century was zinc sulfide.

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
                                             (Stephen Leacock)
Reply to
Fred Abse

Monitors have this as well.

I think that aging CRTs fail from cathode exhaustion mostly. Th emission spot inreases in size, and the image gets fuzzy as a result.

Thomas

Reply to
Zak

As I recall, thought, monitors have a faster (I forget the exact term) loss of brightness per line, so don't have such a tendency to burn in. TV's will and have definitely had a tendency to do so.

Tom

Reply to
Tom MacIntyre

Some do, some don't

Secondary emission due to electrode contamination can cause similar effects.

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
                                             (Stephen Leacock)
Reply to
Fred Abse

Depends on application. Industrial and medical monitors can have quite slow (15-25KHz) scan rates.

Even at high rates, burn-in will be noticeable after a couple of years running 24/7 on a stationary image, especially if it's text.

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
                                             (Stephen Leacock)
Reply to
Fred Abse

Fred Abse schrieb:

I'm not sure burn-in is dependent on refresh rates. I think that at any refresh rates the screen phosphor is "illuminated" the same amount of time (more or less) by electron beam. Perhaps the different types of phosphor (monitor vs. TV) have different decay rates and that's the reason for TVs to tend to burn-in.

Regards

--
Michael Redmann
"It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." (Spock)
Reply to
Michael Redmann

You may well be right. I've not noticed industrial monitors running at

15KHz x 60Hz burn any worse than those running at 31.5KHz x 70-something Hz. They both burn noticeably in a couple of years. It's down to watts per square meter, I guess. Same light output, same power density, same degradation.

Are TV phosphors different from monitor phosphors? TVs don't appear to burn as much, but they generally don't run 24/7 on stationary patterns, and the raster fully fills the screen area, whereas monitors are usually underscanned slightly. It may just be less noticeable.

--
"Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference
is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more
durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it."
                                             (Stephen Leacock)
Reply to
Fred Abse

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