I have purchased and exchanged 8 monitors this year, all had dead pixels out of the box. Is this normal or just rotten luck?

[20_below]

Hello,

 

I seem to be having some insane bad luck with purchasing monitors this year. I bought a Dell SE2717HR from the local Microcenter near me. It had a dead pixel, I then exchanged it for another Dell and got another monitor with another dead pixel. I exchange that Dell for an Acer Nitro XV272U and what do you know? Dead pixel. Did another exchange for another one and got severe backlight bleeding. Exchanged that for an MSI Optix MAG27CQ and boom, dead pixel.

 

At this point I threw in the towel at Microcenter and got a full refund. I decided to give Best Buy a try and bought a Dell S2716DGR and I was in shock when a dead pixel showed up out the box. Best Buy didn't have this Dell in stock anymore, so I exchanged it for a Samsung monitor and got a dead pixel, I exchange it once more and dead pixel out of the box. I literally spent my entire Sunday driving back and forth to Best Buy exchanging a monitors.

Here is my question, this cannot be anywhere close to being normal to have 8 monitors all having dead pixels out of the box. Could something be wrong with my PC that is causing these dead pixels right out of the box? 

[Bombastinator]

  Were they all in the exact same place?

[20_below]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

  Were they all in the exact same place?

No, every time it was in a different spot. 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

Pretty sure up to 5 dead pixels is normal.

Insomuch that a monitor company can refuse to RMA for it anyway.  

[Bombastinator]

Just now, 20_below said:

No, every time it was in a different spot. 

Not the pc or your eyes then.

[20_below]

1 minute ago, valdyrgramr said:

I've heard some companies can refuse a refund over it.

Microcenter gave me a full refund after the 5th exchange. Granted this was within their 30 days return window. I am going to go to Best Buy tomorrow to try one more time, but it just feels like 8 monitors in a row with dead pixels out of the box is extremely fishy, especially since there were all different brands and models.

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, 20_below said:

Microcenter gave me a full refund after the 5th exchange. Granted this was within their 30 days return window. I am going to go to Best Buy tomorrow to try one more time, but it just feels like 8 monitors in a row with dead pixels out of the box is extremely fishy, especially since there were all different brands and models.

It does seem like some rotten luck.  I haven’t bought a new monitor in a while but it didn’t used to be that way.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

could you check the dead pixels at the store?

[Bombastinator]

It occurs to me that this might be a continuous issue if you are looking at bottom shelf monitors.  This is some 2012 vintage data, but long ago LG and Samsung made panels and if the panels didn’t pass their quality standards they there resold to a couple local companies one of which was crossover.  They would build monitors from them anyway and sell them at a massive discount vs the Samsung and LG ones.  They weren’t sold outside of Korea and if you wanted one you had to grey market it.  If this behavior has gone international, you may be seeing this because you’re only looking at factory rejects.

[r0otctrl]

29 minutes ago, 20_below said:

Microcenter gave me a full refund after the 5th exchange. Granted this was within their 30 days return window. I am going to go to Best Buy tomorrow to try one more time, but it just feels like 8 monitors in a row with dead pixels out of the box is extremely fishy, especially since there were all different brands and models.

They may have been all shipped together and were not taken care of in the process.

[r0otctrl]

26 minutes ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

could you check the dead pixels at the store?

This is what he should be doing lol

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I've owned a total of eight LCD monitors and only one had stuck pixels (not the same aas dead). That one monitor had three stuck pixels in a near cluster near the top edge. I was able to get two of them unstuck using a program that "exercises" the pixels by rapidly flashing between colors.

 

I have a serious issues with manufacturers feeling that up to four or so stuck or dead pixels being considered acceptable and not grounds for a warranty claim. That's pure B.S. It's not unreasonable for one to expect something new to work perfectly. Would feel a new car with a V8 engine that misses some on one cylinder to be acceptable. A new TV that can receive all but a few channels?

[20_below]

4 minutes ago, Lady Fitzgerald said:

I've owned a total of eight LCD monitors and only one had stuck pixels (not the same aas dead). That one monitor had three stuck pixels in a near cluster near the top edge. I was able to get two of them unstuck using a program that "exercises" the pixels by rapidly flashing between colors.

 

I have a serious issues with manufacturers feeling that up to four or so stuck or dead pixels being considered acceptable and not grounds for a warranty claim. That's pure B.S. It's not unreasonable for one to expect something new to work perfectly. Would feel a new car with a V8 engine that misses some on one cylinder to be acceptable. A new TV that can receive all but a few channels?

This is my stance on this issue as well. I am paying $300 of hard earned cash to buy something and expecting it to work properly without any issues. I am trying one last ditch effort tomorrow to exchange it once more, but I have a feeling that I am going to receive the same result.

 

42 minutes ago, r0otctrl said:

This is what he should be doing lol

I actually tried doing this in store the 2nd time when exchanging for the Samsung monitor, but they were only able to power it on and not attach it to any desktops in the facility so I wasn't able to see the dead pixel on just a black screen very well. It was only when using EIZO that I was able to catch it immediately.

 

I just plugged my 6 year old 1080p monitor back in just as a sanity check and everything is working as expected. It is crazy that quality control for monitors has gone down significantly and yet my 6 year old monitor that I bought while in college is still going strong. Makes me wonder if I should even bother buying a new monitor and save myself the headache.

[r0otctrl]

18 minutes ago, 20_below said:

This is my stance on this issue as well. I am paying $300 of hard earned cash to buy something and expecting it to work properly without any issues. I am trying one last ditch effort tomorrow to exchange it once more, but I have a feeling that I am going to receive the same result.

 

I actually tried doing this in store the 2nd time when exchanging for the Samsung monitor, but they were only able to power it on and not attach it to any desktops in the facility so I wasn't able to see the dead pixel on just a black screen very well. It was only when using EIZO that I was able to catch it immediately.

 

I just plugged my 6 year old 1080p monitor back in just as a sanity check and everything is working as expected. It is crazy that quality control for monitors has gone down significantly and yet my 6 year old monitor that I bought while in college is still going strong. Makes me wonder if I should even bother buying a new monitor and save myself the headache.

They didn't have a monitor to test it on ??

 

Did you buy all of these monitors from the same store?

[20_below]

27 minutes ago, r0otctrl said:

hey didn't have a monitor to test it on ??

 

Did you buy all of these monitors from the same store?

No, first 5 were from Microcenter, next 3 from Best Buy (first was at one best buy and the other two were at another location since they didn't have the Dell or Samsung in stock).

[r0otctrl]

49 minutes ago, 20_below said:

No, first 5 were from Microcenter, next 3 from Best Buy (first was at one best buy and the other two were at another location since they didn't have the Dell or Samsung in stock).

Weird. There shouldn't be dead pixels on a screen. Usually this is due to poor care of the product during shipping/transport. So maybe all of those monitors came off the same boat or truck lol

[Tan3l6]

Roll of 0 in LCD lottery.

[VIVO-US]

The ISO industry standard is up to 5 bad pixels before a panel is considered defective, but getting that many bad screens in a row is definitely bad luck.  We've been carrying replacement laptop screens for a long time, and in a case of 20 screens, I'd rarely see more than a couple with a bad pixel.  There have been a few times when an entire case had pixel issues, but that was rare.

 

Most of our workstations use Asus and HP monitors in the $100 to $120 range, and I don't think I've seen a bad pixel on any of them.  My Acer 1440p monitor at home has a couple pad pixels, but I don't see them 99.9% of the time since they're tiny and remain black (stuck on a certain color would be a different story).  Acer didn't respond to me when asked about it, so I decided to leave it alone this time around.

[SolarNova]

Dont you just love the super modern technology that is LCD , that replaced the 'totally' inferior CRT of yesteryear ...

#sarcasm.

Seriously though. Subpixel and full pixel defects are somewhat common. The more pixels on screen, and the smaller they are, the more likely you'll get a defective one.

[20_below]

Just exchanged the monitor once more during my lunch break and the 9th monitor now has two dead pixels  I'm just going to chalk this up as a loss and try buying monitors again at a later point in my life lol.

[Bombastinator]

21 minutes ago, 20_below said:

Just exchanged the monitor once more during my lunch break and the 9th monitor now has two dead pixels  I'm just going to chalk this up as a loss and try buying monitors again at a later point in my life lol.

Quit is an option.  Get mad is another.  My move would be to demand a 50% neutral gray screen demonstration in store so you can search for faulty merch without this stupid back-and-forth.  Go through every one they have if you have to.

 

Its what I plan on doing now after reading this thread.  I’m gonna walk into microcenter and bring along a machine I can test with.  If they make me buy it first that’s fine.  I’m gonna buy it, open the box in the store and test it right at the returns desk.

[Mnky313]

17 hours ago, 20_below said:

-snip-

I would say it's bad luck. Out of all the monitors I have bought from Amazon/Microcenter (total of 6), only 1 had bad pixels (and it was a single pixel). Though I do have 2 dead pixels on my laptop display but that was from eBay and they told me 1-5 was normal (I assume these were B grade returns or something similar as they were just panels, not full displays)

[porina]

17 hours ago, 20_below said:

I seem to be having some insane bad luck with purchasing monitors this year.

I haven't bought any displays for a while so don't have comparable experience, but your post did remind me of this tweet. Not that it matters who in this context, but he wrote the software that Google used to calculate the world record digits of Pi earlier this year.

 

 

 

[20_below]

I am actually going to send this monitor directly into Samsung to have them repair it. Figured instead of doing the lottery every time at Best Buy that I should just send it i and wait a few weeks for them to repair the screen. I got nothing left to lose at this point.

 

But seriously, I cannot believe that quality control has gone down this much. I know it's the holidays coming up so they are trying to push out as many units to stores as possible, but to encounter 9 straight dead pixels from different brands and models from two entirely different stores (one store being two separate locations) is absurd. 

[ewitte]

Sounds like extremely bad luck I've seen hundred's of monitors possibly a thousand+ LCD if you count laptops and have only seen 2-3 in the last 10 years with bad pixels.  Even the one I ordered from Korea years ago.