Thomas Much's Weblog

Phantoms & Ghosts on my LCD

With recent events concerning the stability of my hardware I'm a little careful now whenever I see something strange or unusual... A few days ago I had a déjà vu on the LCD screen of my 20" iMac G5 (rev. B "ALS"). I looked at a browser window that displayed a dotted yellow line - and when I looked a little to the right, I saw a line of faint dots, too:

When I place a window with a dotted line like above on certain areas of the screen, these shadows or phantom images are absolutely reproducable. This seems to be a problem of the screen itself, not one of the graphics card or the video ram - because the phantom dots do not appear on screen shots (I had to take a photo to depict the shadow line).

Now, is this a common effect of LCDs? Or is this something to be afraid of, a first sign of a decaying screen? Well, we'll see, maybe time (or Google) will tell. But fortunately, this time I've got AppleCare.