Curious about damage to monitor coating

[flaavu]

I'm asking this more out of curiosity, as it's unlikely to be fixable. However, I have the following damage to my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 1413 monitor:-

(Exaggerated considerably in photo due to flash and unsharp mask, but representative).

I first noticed these "scratches" on the coating almost 2 years ago when I'd moved house, and put it down to damage in transit. They show up as brighter areas on the display.

Thing is, I'm almost 100% sure they weren't anything like this bad 2 years back. Their existence was mildly annoying, but they weren't excessively intrusive when (e.g.) using Photoshop. Now they're majorly prominent, and intrusive even in everyday use.

Not convinced? Note the clear areas of damage at the top and bottom. These go right up to the top and bottom bevel edges with no visible boundary. How would a simple scratch cause this?

- Flaavu

 

[Guest]

Could be fungal thing like affects camera lenses. These fungi'll live on anything !!!

 

[flaavu]

It doesn't look like fungi though; it looks like the coating is missing, and more like scratches or scuffs, albeit with a strange forked pattern.

I know fungus that eats CDs, DVDs and the like is a problem in some areas, but I don't live in a country where this is a problem (Scotland, coincidentally enough given your picture!) and there isn't even any damp in the house.

 

[graywolf]

I'm still on CRT's. Is that a non-glare coating? If so, you might just scrape all of it off with a paint scraper, the kind that holds a single-edge razor blade, until its natural life is ended. Most of us have done fine without non-glare coatings if we position the room lamps properly.

 

[flaavu]

Yeah, it's definitely the non-glare coating- you can see the reflections are significantly higher in the damaged areas, though. (The photograph exaggerates this, and in practice the problem isn't reflected glare but the difference in brightness of the monitor picture itself in those areas.)

To be honest though, it's not such a good monitor that it's worth the hassle, plus moving around the fixed ceiling light. (*)

I'm still convinced the "scratches" have got worse though, because they're annoyingly prominent in a way that I don't remember them being when they first appeared.

(*) Actually, it's quite weird. It was a warranty replacement that always had dodgy "white" gamma that can only be corrected via software settings- i.e. in Windows/Linux rather than via the controls.

Plus one point where it abruptly developed a slightly different gamma curve on the green channel (leading to a magenta cast in midtones that couldn't be fixed by simple colour correction and appeared to be a problem with the monitor's internal settings rather than hardware that went as soon as it had come).

Plus the EDID info seems to have disappeared- even when connected directly rather than via KVM- making it a nuisance with Windows and even worse with Ubuntu Linux.

Plus when it enters what one would expect to be the switched-off power saving mode, it displays a white box in the centre of the screen instead.

Plus it seems to discharge masses of static on switch off leading to popping and bright white flashes on the screen itself.

If it wasn't for all that and the scratched display, I'd say it was actually quite a good monitor, being a Trinitron clone and still being pretty sharp after more than six years use.