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

For real?

[Bloater]

Remarkably, this doesn't appear to be an april fools joke. The comments in the discussion seem to date from quite a few days ago. This is probably just a bit of code that is inserted in the GDI and has a guess at a reasonable adjustment for pixel intensity. Hopefully it doesn't adjust gamma, because that would look dumb, a faded monitor needs the darker intensities to be raised, while mid intensities stay roughly where they were. Raising gamma increases the middle intensities too much. I also doubt this would work for games using DirectX or OpenGL (too much effort, and unrobust).

April Fools is done...

[Jack Johnson]

I recall a time in the 90s when April Fools news did a great job of walking the thin line of perfectly plausible. Great effort was put into crafting stories that took days and even years to refute. Sheng Long from early 90s April EGM comes to mind. Of course, I understand that the wealth of information available on the 'net these days has changed things signifigantly. However, most of these articles really didn't even try. Lets have less Photoshop and more though next year.

The Real Trick

[miyako]

you know, I realize that this was just an april fools joke, but really, it goes to show something. One of the biggest drain on laptop batteries is the screen, and I know a lot of people keep the brightness on their monitor up pretty high. Yet people ran this program, and didn't notice any difference in the screen gradually darkening. This might be a good way to save battery power on laptops. Start the screen at "normal" brightness, and then have it slowly start to darken, letting your eyes adjust slowly, in order to save battery life.
(do I get extra karma for posting an insightful comment on slashdot on april 1?)