[PLUG] lcd care and feeding

Eric Wilhelm scratchcomputing at gmail.com
Thu Feb 7 08:36:43 UTC 2008


# from Rich Shepard
# on Wednesday 06 February 2008 17:24:

>   With my first LCD monitor I turned it off at night because I could
> see the glow when the lights were out. Burned it out in no time.
> Hitachi was good about a replacement, but now I just leave it on
> continuosly.

Turning it off burned it out?

>> I'm considering replacing my screensaver with:
>>
>>  xset dpms force off
>
>   I don't force it off, but the screen blanks in 10 minutes of no
> keyboard or trackball action, then it goes into sleep mode after a
> half-hour.

My meter shows off, suspend, and standby all exhibiting the same 
behavior:  the draw drops to 0.1A for a few seconds and then to about 
0.01A.

My question is whether using a blank screen/screensaver is worth it at 
all instead of just going straight to standby after e.g. 10 minutes.

Incidently, blank screen saves no power (though I guess it would prevent 
ghosting.)  Actually, a black blank screen uses more power than a white 
one by about 0.02A (during normal operation the meter is below black 
and above white.)

Thus, if there's nothing wrong with the extra power cycles, 30 minutes 
of blank screen to the tune of 30W hardly seems worth it.

I don't really know what to make of your Hitachi story though -- are you 
saying you left it blank during the day and manually turned it off at 
night because the suspend would never kick-in?  I could see how that 
would run out the clock on the backlight.

--Eric
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