The monitor is an LG Flatron 795FT Plus, 17" CRT with 4 port USB HUB.

Had this monitor for about 4-5 years now and never found any explanation for this problem, so I thought I'd try here!

Ever since I've had it, the picture has never been anything but dark in Windows and some games so dark I can't see them even using ingame gamma/brightness controls! Even turning up the Contrast/Brightness to 100 on the monitor makes no difference. In XP I have to rely on nView Desktop Manager and set hotkeys for Gamma +/- so I can increase it to a level where I can actually see the picture in a game. In Vista I have to rely on ATI Tool and it's hotkey gamma adjust as shortsighted Nvidia do not support nView anymore for Vista, but this does not always work for some games.

There are no other adjustments to make on the monitor, Video Level voltage is 0.7v which I believe is correct, and that's about all I can alter, 1.0v being the other and that makes it an even darker picture! I've also built a new PC so everything bar the monitor has changed and I still get this same dark picture problem!

So anyone care to have a guess why this monitor displays pictures that are so dark?

Maybe it's sick, the poor thing, and you just won't let it die. Sorry, no idea how to fix it.

You could buy yourself a 19" widescreen LCD for $200, and I think you'd like it. When I switched from 19" CRT to 20" wide LCD it mas a MAJOR improvement.

I don't know what's wrong either

Maybe some internal pot needs adjusting, need a TV Engineer for that though! I've a mate with a Samsung SM226BW 22" WS and it does look nice, however funds are not availabe ATM to buy anything for my PC so stuck with the LG for the forseeable future

yup, its sick... I could possibly fix it (I used to do that for a living, even did warranty work for LG).

but the cost would outweigh the value. save up for a new one, crt's are toss-away's now, except in rare cases

Thing is it's been like this since I had it. It was a warranty replacement, the other one just shrank the picture to a 1 pixel line across the screen!

I'll tap up a few local TV Engineers and see if it's worth letting them have a look, probably afford a repair just not a new monitor!

it might be a quicky, but not always.

the shop I used to work at (when I was doing monitors) charged 75 bucks for repair of a 17 incher, plus parts if they were expensive (flybacks, some HOT's, ect).

the problem with the LG's (and most computer controlled monitors) is that you cant do much for adjusting on them without the special interface that goes inbetween a pc and the monitor. That interface combines a serial communications link over the DB15 (on unused pins), then of course, you need the custom software for that monitor.

you might get lucky and just need a G2 adjustment, which on a lot of LG monitors was still on the flyback. Some of the newer ones I worked on didn't have it there, but thru the damn software only!

It's that difficult to adjust, oh!

I know there are tools to read the EDID of the monitor and reprogram it, wonder if that would help in anyway?