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That is a picture of my ViewSonic VP191b LCD monitor taken with a Canon PowerShot G1 digital camera, demonstrating the problem I have. For a higher resolution version click here. The screen is showing a solid gray background, the standard "Silver" WinXP color scheme background. The thin white line at the bottom is the auto-hidden Windows taskbar. I carefully cleaned the surface of the monitor before taking the picture.
So what's all the visible crap on the screen you ask? Image persistence. Or "burn-in" as it's more commonly known as. Of course technically it's not the same as burn-in on CRTs, but to the human eye it looks the same. I bought this monitor from Newegg back in June of 2005, so it's not even a year old yet, although I understand it's been a discontinued model for some time now. I'm a pretty hardcore computer user, and gamer in particular, and am usually sitting at my computer 12 or more hours per day, so this monitor gets a lot of use.
I didn't notice the problem when I first got the monitor. I think it has developed and gotten worse over time. Some of you may be able to tell the game I play the most by looking at the image, the effect is so bad. Every static element of the game is permanently "etched" into the screen. Well, not permanently, but near enough. I left the monitor powered off and unplugged for two full weeks over the holidays, and not even that was enough to eliminate every trace of persistence.
And it's not only games that cause the problem. Any high-intensity (color/brightness) static display left long enough will burn-in. Parts of the Windows taskbar. Bookmark icons in a maximized browser window. If I fall asleep for a few hours and the screensaver fails to come on (for whatever reason), when I wake up I am likely to see parts of whatever text was displayed burned-in for a while. It's highly annoying and distracting.
The persistence effect is only visible on darker, solid shades of color. You can't see it on pure white, and you can't see it on pure black. Just the darker end of the color/brightness spectrum. The effect can be virtually unnoticeable in many Windows applications, surfing the web, etc. But for watching TV, movies and gaming it can be particularly nasty. The vertical smear 2/3 of the way across the screen does not seem to correspond to anything static that I'm aware of, so that may be a separate problem.
Other than this persistence issue, I love the monitor. It doesn't have a single dead/stuck pixel, the viewing angles are good, and the response rate is excellent (great for gaming). But the image persistence is totally unacceptable. I have tried various things to fix it, like leaving a pure white screen burning overnight, or pure black, or one of those animated rainbow color screensavers. But none seem to do any good. And jumping through hoops like that shouldn't be necessary, IMO.
I'm posting this here to see if anyone else has a similar problem with their VP191b (or other LCD monitor). I can't help but wonder if the panel the VP191b uses had a known issue and that's why ViewSonic discontinued it. Maybe something related to the "overdrive" technology it uses. But I'm just guessing. I know many LCDs are prone to this image persistence thing, but in my case it seems particularly severe. Do you guys think it warrants a return to Newegg/ViewSonic?
Nor should such antics be necessary, IMO.