Monitor gone blurry

[hblair]

I have a CTX 19" monitor about a year old. The thing has been getting progressively blurry over the past several months. The edges are ok, but the middle is so bad I can't read anything at all and my gunnery in the game has gone downhill. Anybody got a fix? Slappin the snot out of it deosn't seem to help.

ideas?

[Siaf__csf]

Monitors usually have 3 years guarantee, have it fixed.

[Eagler]

Originally posted by hblair
I have a CTX 19" monitor .... Anybody got a fix?
ideas?

don't buy CTX?

[hblair]

Is CTX a low end monitor eagler?

[Skuzzy]

Yes hblair.  The tubes are usually Sony's low-end line, with even cheaper electronics and power supplies.

[hblair]

My bad, it's a philips monitor. lol, dunno where I got CTX from. I think my old one at home might have been a CTX. Are philips junk too?

[Skuzzy]

I don't have any experience with Philips monitors, so can't really say where they fit in the food chain.

Have you tried to deguass the monitor?

[Stringer]

Well, for starters, clean the monitor.

Then, before you go poking your fingers at the monitor, clean your hands from all the beemer grease and auto body paint.

And finally, as the front porch may be an acceptable place for your washer in your neck of the woods, it is not a particularly preferred spot for you computer.

If you need more help, please ask classy man on the other forum

[hblair]

Yep skuzzy, I've done that to no avail. I've already decided I'm gonna take home one of these extra 17" monitors til I have that one repaired or throw it in the trash.

Stringer, too much junk on the porch. My puters out in the front yard next to my old rusted out camaro. Think the rainwater might have caused a problem?

[Skuzzy]

If degaussing didn't restore it, then I would say the tube is about to go south.

What you are seeing is a failure in the magnetic guns designed to keep the beams focused on a single phosphor.  The beams are now bleeding over to other nearby phoshpors.  This causes blurriness.
As a beam sweeps over a monitor it has to be focused for each step across the internal face of the tube.  This is due to the arc of the tube being longer than the radius of the sweep of the beam.

Need more details?

Basically, think of it as a pendulum swinging over the floor with the goal to keep the pendulum the same distance from the floor.  This requires you to move the pivot point up and down as the pendulum swings.
Your tube's pivot point has stopped moving up and down.  Maybe that is a better explanation.

[LoneStarBuckeye]

I've had blurriness problems before due to signal smearing in the cable between the video card and the monitor.  This effect results from trying to push too much information through a bandlimited channel.  You can tell if the cable is the culprit by lowering the resolution to 640x480, thereby limiting the amount of information being sent over the cable.  If the problem largely disappears, the cable is a likely cause.  This is not just hypothetical.  I've seen this a number of times with "cheap" replacement or extension cables.  If you're still using the stock (unextended) monitor cable, I'd think it unlikely that the problem is with the cable.

[hblair]

Wow, cool info skuzzy and buckeye. I took home a 17" monitor last night and swapped 'em out. buckeye, it has the factory permanently connected cable. I guess thats not the problem, thanks for the info though. Now my problem is I'm trying to load windows and can't find a product key. I have 3 win98 SE discs and no key #. I should have that taken care of tonight. Hopefully I'll be back in the air tonight.