Chris Nahr
10-24-2003, 12:49 PM
My cherished NEC MultiSync LCD-1810 which I bought for the fantastic price of DM 8074 (~€/$ 4000) in September 1998 today joined the spritis of its cathode ray powered ancestors... exactly five years and one month after I bought it. What's the standard warranty for electronic equipment? Oh yeah, five years. :roll:
What happened was kind of interesting, actually. When an input signal was fed to the monitor it would appear briefly, then the screen would go dark. Apparently the backlight had failed. There was absolutely no warning before the monitor suddenly became unusable, no darker screen or anything. Guess it's imprudent to rely on a single LCD monitor without a backup. Pretty annoying too, in the 20 years I've been using computers this is one of very few cases where I had to replace equipment because it failed, rather than because it became obsolete.
Maybe NEC would have replaced the backlight but I didn't have a backup monitor so I needed another one fairly soon. The one I've got now is a Sony SDM-HX73 -- same resolution (1280x1024), slightly smaller (17" instead of 18"), but it has DVI input and loudspeakers, a great image quality, and a very nifty feature that automatically adjusts image brightness to the light level of the room.
Actually it's also available as a 19" model that's barely more expensive (€800 instead of €600) but that model wasn't available locally, and I didn't even know about it until I had the new monitor hooked up. Anyway, now I see that 20" models with 1600x1200 are touching down on the €1000 price range. I guess I'll get one of those in a couple of months and then keep the HX73 as a backup, just in case this happens again.
Oh, and the HX73 doesn't have any dead pixels, as far as I can tell. So manufacturing has definitely improved in the last five years.
What happened was kind of interesting, actually. When an input signal was fed to the monitor it would appear briefly, then the screen would go dark. Apparently the backlight had failed. There was absolutely no warning before the monitor suddenly became unusable, no darker screen or anything. Guess it's imprudent to rely on a single LCD monitor without a backup. Pretty annoying too, in the 20 years I've been using computers this is one of very few cases where I had to replace equipment because it failed, rather than because it became obsolete.
Maybe NEC would have replaced the backlight but I didn't have a backup monitor so I needed another one fairly soon. The one I've got now is a Sony SDM-HX73 -- same resolution (1280x1024), slightly smaller (17" instead of 18"), but it has DVI input and loudspeakers, a great image quality, and a very nifty feature that automatically adjusts image brightness to the light level of the room.
Actually it's also available as a 19" model that's barely more expensive (€800 instead of €600) but that model wasn't available locally, and I didn't even know about it until I had the new monitor hooked up. Anyway, now I see that 20" models with 1600x1200 are touching down on the €1000 price range. I guess I'll get one of those in a couple of months and then keep the HX73 as a backup, just in case this happens again.
Oh, and the HX73 doesn't have any dead pixels, as far as I can tell. So manufacturing has definitely improved in the last five years.