You know how pressing a finger on LCD hard wrecks the blacks?
Shipping/boxes/foam can do that!
It's sometimes shocking how long the box was stored in a warehouse or in a container ship, stacked high, and sometimes incorrectly horizontal/flat, or accidentally dropped by shipper sadly. So it presses on corners, or middle, or other things and really wrecks the unboxing experience for some. Whether corners being pressed inwards, or foam pressing onto the screen/bezels/etc, squeezing edges hard, etc. Imagine fingers pressing on glass for weeks.
The confusion is that there are THREE simultaneous problems with inconsistent blacks that can superimpose on each other concurrently.
- Backlight bleed
- This looks like bright splotches at the very edges
- Always nonsymmetric/nonuniform.
Cause: This is a loose LCD bezel not sealing the LCD backlight/edgelight fully. Often an RMA issue if very bad, although daring people have opened up a monitorand tightened up the metal besels around a LCD to varying successes/failures (warranty voided).
. - Pressure spots/LCD fluid distribution
- Often dark/bright splotchiness throughout an odd location on the screen, or screen center, or along a whole edge.
- Usually nonsymmetric, sometimes can be uniform or nonuniform
- Can improve over time, after freshly unboxing a monitor.
Cause: Objects pressing against the screen, or the glass panel being twisted, e.g. during shipping or storage of monitor box. It pushes the fluid (liquid) of the Liquid Crystal Display, creating nonuniformities in amount of LCD fluid in different parts of panel, creating differences in some colors/greys especially in dark screens (blacks). It’s like a finger pressing on the screen nonstop for 24/7 and takes a long time for that long-term pressure spot to fade (days of warm-up). Except it was just a piece of foam/plasticwrap/etc or the weight of the screen itself while boxed-up and shipped in all kinds of bumps and wrong box positions, etc (keep monitors stored right-side-up!)
. - IPS Glow
- Does not change/improve over time
- Always corners/symmetric when viewed head-on
Cause: this is simply how IPS slightly changes contrast ratio when you view IPS off-axis, VA panels have a similar effect too. Much more visible if you view an IPS screen from up close, the corners become brighter, because when screen center is perfectly perpendicular to your eyes, the corners are not perpendicular (often viewed 5 or 10 degrees off axis). Pressure spots can sometimes also occur at corners, and can amplify this and confuse a diagnosis.
A confusion is that (A)(B)(C) are simultaneously happening
A confusion is that (A)(B)(C) are mis-disdiagnosed on other mere mortal forums.
*** Public Service Announcement: When other forums/twitter mislead you, please correct them that this is not always IPS glow, and permalink to a Blur Busters post like this ***
Many stores gives you a 1 week or 2 week return window, so you can speed things up by running the monitor this way:
Speeding up Break-In Period
- Run 24/7 at 100% brightness temporarily upon receiving a new monitor for first time.
- Temporarily disable your Power Plan (set all to "Never") & run a dark video or a dark animated screensaver such as Ribbons 24/7
- Hotter = lower viscosity of the liquid in the LIQUID crystal display (L.C.D.), the fluid between the glass layers.
- Dark/blacks = more light absorption = hotter
- Faster break in (to fix your blacks before Amazon RMA, etc).
You just need to give time for the liquid behind the glass to reflow.
- liquid-crystal-layer.png (301.47 KiB) Viewed 7329 times
When a monitor is packed, semi-permanent (24-to-100-hour) pressure spots can form because of monitor pressing against foam or a sideways shipping box causing the monitor stand to press against the LCD glass. Imagine holding a finger hard on the whole left edge of LCD for 1 week. Boom. Long-term pressure spot. They take a VERY long time to disappear (days instead of minutes/seconds).
Do not confuse IPS Glow with pressure spots even though they can sometimes look identical
You might save an RMA or two if you do this first. You don't need to wait until Day 25, just run 24/7 at 100% brightness on dark scenes, to speed up break-in to stay in your warranty-claim window.
Need proof? A breakin-success image shared on Monitor Enthusiasts Channel on Discord:
- breakin.jpg (825 KiB) Viewed 7372 times
