Conned?

[Killajaz]

Hi... just picked up a used Dell p1110 which is basically a 21" Sony CRT with Trinitron, some of the best CRT's around.

I paid peanuts as he said the resolution was blurry at 1600x1200 and higher.
As I game at 1280x1024 it dont bother me. However, now that I have plugged it in the colours are totally washed out. It all looks very grey and bleak.
As soon as I open an app it flicks like if it tries to resize the screen.
The picture is not sharp either...z

Across the screen there are also some horizontal green lines. This is not the two grey lines which you always have in Trinitrons.

He said the monitor has not been used for some time. Could it be that it is cold and need to warm up, or is it simply borked like I suspect?

 

[Killajaz]

Well I have been finding some interesting stuff about this particular model.
The grey shade/washed out colours is a brightness problem which is very common with this screen due to poor capacitors.

I have brightness set to 0, green bias set to 0 and it still looks terrible. Many have the same problem. It can be fixed via hardware, but it would probably cost more than the £15 I paid for it.

I could return it, but that is 65 miles away which means petrol costs... doh.