Ultimate Monitor Testing Guide

So, you just bought a new monitor and want to ensure the panel is perfect? Or perhaps you suspect your current display is starting to fail. Welcome to the **Ultimate Monitor Testing Guide**, the comprehensive manual detailing exactly what each display artifact means and how to spot it using MonitorTest.net.

1. How to Find Dead and Stuck Pixels

A dead pixel is a transistor that has permanently lost power, resulting in a black dot on your screen. A stuck pixel, on the other hand, is a sub-pixel (Red, Green, or Blue) that is continuously receiving power, resulting in a bright, colorful dot that won't change.

How to Test: Use our first test tool. It cycles your entire screen through pure White, Red, Green, Blue, and Black. Look closely at the screen from a few inches away. If you see a black dot on the white screen, it's dead. If you see a green dot on a black screen, it's stuck.

2. IPS Glow vs. Backlight Bleeding

If you own an IPS monitor, you'll likely experience IPS Glow. This is a visible "halo" or golden/white shimmer emanating from the corners of your screen when viewing dark content. It shifts based on your viewing angle.

Backlight Bleed is different. It is light literally leaking around the edges of the LCD bezel. It looks like flashlights pointed from the edge of your screen inward, and the intensity does not change when you move your head.

How to Test: Turn off all the lights in your room. Maximize your monitor's brightness. Run the IPS Glow / Light Bleed test (Pure Black Screen). Wait 5 minutes for your eyes to adjust to the dark.

3. Screen Tearing and Refresh Rates

When the frame rate of your PC is out of sync with your monitor's physical refresh rate (Hz), your monitor might display parts of two different frames at exactly the same time. The result is a horizontal "cut" or tear across the screen.

How to Test: Run the Tearing test. Watch the fast-moving vertical line. If the line appears broken or zigzagged as it pans across, your display is tearing. You should enable G-Sync, FreeSync, or V-Sync in your graphics settings.

4. Ghosting and Overdrive

Ghosting refers to the blurry trail or "smear" left behind by fast-moving objects. It happens because liquid crystals in the display cannot change color fast enough (response time).

To mask this, manufacturers use Overdrive (injecting extra voltage to force pixels to change faster). However, if overdrive is set too high, it causes Inverse Ghosting (Corona)—a bright, discolored halo trailing the object.

5. OLED Burn-in

Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) displays offer perfect blacks, but the organic compounds degrade over time. If a static image (like a Windows taskbar, a TV channel logo, or a game HUD) is left on screen for thousands of hours, it can leave a permanent ghost image.

Use the Burn-in test (Solid Gray and Red) to easily spot etched-in UI elements. If you see ghosted text on a solid color, the panel has suffered Burn-in.