Screen Cleaner Brightens Fading Displays

Dirty Screen Boy writes "Over time, your LCD or CRT monitor will gradually fade in brightness and contrast. This fading is inevitable, because the backlights for LCD screens eventually fade, and the photo-reactive substrate on CRT monitors eventually degrades. ScreenCleaner Pro rectifies this situation by altering the gamma of your monitor to compensate for monitor degradation, so it will look as good as new. Don't toss out that old monitor, just run ScreenCleaner Pro on it, and watch your old monitor gain a new life. Simply let ScreenCleaner Pro run in the background, and it will automatically analyze your monitor's gamma curve and relative luminescence. After enough calibration data has been collected, ScreenCleaner Pro will adjust your monitor to like-new condition. The analyzation/calibration process can take up to 10 minutes, but you can work normally while ScreenCleaner Pro is analyzing your monitor; simply let it run in the background."

Comments

Features disabled in firmware

[Colol]

Every CRT monitor actually ships with a built-in dustcloth (or, in some higher-end models, a tiny man with a squeegee), but it's rendered unusable through trickery. Most monitor companies disable it by cutting a trace, while others disable it using firmware.

Firmware's trivial to bypass, but the cut traces... now that's tricky. What this software does is actually increase the speed of the electrons inside your monitor so they can jump the gap -- much like an Olympic long jumper -- and activate the cleaning circuitry.

If you take your monitor housing apart and turn out the lights in the room while running the software, you can actually watch this occur several times per second. It's fascinating to see.