On Sunday I finally made up my mind on which monitor I’d purchase to replace my dying CRT monitor. To my surprise, it was none of the monitors I was looking at previously. I ended up choosing the Acer AL1916Ab 19″ LCD Monitor. It had good reviews on Newegg, was cheaper than the previous monitors I was looking at, and had improved specs over the previous monitors. I had really found a steal.

So, yesterday the monitor arrived. I was a little nervous since this was my first LCD purchase, and I was hoping I had picked the best monitor for my situation. After spending about an hour cleaning up a massive cable mess, I finally installed the monitor. A big sigh of relief came over me; the monitor worked perfectly. At first I wasn’t too happy with the quality of the color, however, that was do to my previous monitor’s settings. It took me around another hour to fine tune my color settings in both Windows and Mac OS X so they would match. Once that was done I could finally enjoy the monitor

So far I haven’t had any grips about the monitor, besides one thing which I’ll address in the next paragraph. The color looks perfect, the text is sharp, the increased screen space comes in handy, and the monitor is made of high quality parts. I was a little worried about refresh times in games since LCDs tend to have a problem keeping up, but that hasn’t been an issue. The 8ms response time has done its job keeping up with my fast-paced visual usage.

However, there is one problem with my monitor, and I’m sure this is going to come as no surprise. I have a stuck pixel. The pixel is cyan and it’s on the bottom right of the screen. It shows up constantly unless the image is white. It’s not noticeable on certain colors, but a close inspection reveals it’s still there. I was well aware about dead/stuck pixels when I made my purchase, and I was hoping that wouldn’t be a problem. Unfortunately I got one, and there is nothing I can do about it. Newegg’s policy is eight pixels or more and Acer’s policy is four or more pixels. So, I’m just going to have to live with it.

I have tried fixing the stuck pixel myself. I ran a few of those color flashing videos, but none have worked yet. I’ve also tried rubbing the pixel back to life several different ways, and that’s failed also. I’m not going to stop, though. Every night I’m going to run a color flashing image until the pixel is gone. I’m also going to try and rub it out every once in awhile. Hopefully persistence will pay off eventually.

Excluding the stuck pixel, I’m very pleased with the monitor. Sure, it’s annoying knowing there is a stuck pixel on the monitor, but I don’t really notice it during most of my computing. I’m sure eventually the pixel will correct itself, so I would still recommend it to anyone who is in the market for an LCD and is short on cash. Stuck/dead pixels are a common thing with LCDs and we just have to live with them. Maybe one day LCD manufactures will up their quality control and we can all have error-free LCDs. Until then, we can come up with methods to fix the manufacturers’ errors. So, if you have any techniques to jump starting a stuck pixel, please let me know.