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Displays Businesses Apple

Screen Cleaner Brightens Fading Displays 76

Posted by CmdrTaco from the its-probably-a-worm dept.
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."
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Screen Cleaner Brightens Fading Displays More

Screen Cleaner Brightens Fading Displays

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  • Alternately... (Score:4, Funny)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @06:50PM (#12117079) Homepage Journal
    get a "cloth" and "wipe" the display.
    • Ok, I'm gonna try it on my ADI Microscan 4V, and I'll get back in here... (Oh, wait, here comes the maid, with her bottle of Windex and a cloth...I'll move to one side to let her, oh, don't look, clean the monitor.) There, that looks better, doesn't it?
    • What, the product isn't a holographic sticker that I can put on the side of my monitor to make it stay clean?
  • Wow, it's never been this easy to get first post. Too bad it will be off the front page in about 13 minutes. My this is getting WAY too looney.
  • No really, there's nothing.

    At all.

    Zip.

    Nada.

  • April 2nd (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I mean c'mon, its already April 2nd in Europe...

  • 50th April fool (Score:2, Funny)

    by Seft ( 659449 )
    I think we should all give cmdrtaco a round of applause.
  • Nothing for you to see here, please move along.
  • I want to know how this was able to anylyse anything in my monitor? I ran it for awhile and it didn't do anything, then suddenly 10 minutes later it's like its wiping large amounts of dust off the screen. It's made a really good difference to the screen.

    Is this permanent or something I will have to run often? its not going to shorten the monitor life is it? I have a CRT.
    • Are you serious????????

      Have you even *read* slashdot in the last 24 hours?
    • Dear Lord, Allah, Mohammed, and the volcano guy...
      All it's doing is lowering the gamma of your screen over 10 minutes and the raising back to normal all at once.

      The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. This was an easy one.

      (Damn. Already drunk and feeding the trolls.)

    • Features disabled in firmware (Score:5, Funny)

      by Colol ( 35104 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @08:14PM (#12117777)
      Every CRT monitor actually ships with a built-in dustcloth (or, in some higher-end models, a tiny man with a squeegee), but it's rendered unusable through trickery. Most monitor companies disable it by cutting a trace, while others disable it using firmware.

      Firmware's trivial to bypass, but the cut traces... now that's tricky. What this software does is actually increase the speed of the electrons inside your monitor so they can jump the gap -- much like an Olympic long jumper -- and activate the cleaning circuitry.

      If you take your monitor housing apart and turn out the lights in the room while running the software, you can actually watch this occur several times per second. It's fascinating to see.

  • Is this legal? (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by artifex2004 ( 766107 )
    I thought anything that refined gamma emitters would get Homeland Gestap^M^M^M^M^M^MSecurity after you, right quick.
  • It will instantly adjust your gamma to zero. It will fill your house wiht toxic smoke, too, so you if you gets all humans and pets out the house first, you can use it to fumigate for pests.

    Guess all you non-'merkins are out of luck!
  • It's for Mac OS X...

  • For real? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Bloater ( 12932 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @07:03PM (#12117303) Homepage Journal
    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).

    • Re:For real? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Geoffreyerffoeg ( 729040 ) on Friday April 01, 2005 @07:35PM (#12117540)
      Just to explain for those of you who haven't looked hard enough...

      (spoiler alert)

      The program slowly dims your monitor for 10 minutes, then brightens it back to how it was. Yes, it's an April Fool's joke. Probably the only one today that actually fooled people....
      • The program slowly dims your monitor for 10 minutes, then brightens it back to how it was. Yes, it's an April Fool's joke. Probably the only one today that actually fooled people....

        Ironically, I figured it had to do just that simply by reading the description on the Macworld "review" ;)

        But there is a grain of truth though... My by now 10-year-old Eizo 17" CRT has dimmed a bit over time. But it's still sharp enough for 1280x1023, so I'm not complaining. Then again, it was PC Magazine's monitor of the yea
  • 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.
    • Funny, if you'd bother to check the link, I think you'd find this one appears, at least, to be real. I don't have a Mac, so I can't test it for myself... lol
    • I recall playing so much SFII to see if it was real; I think I ended up convincing myself that you had to perfect everyone in 1P mode to get it. Needless to say, I wasn't successful (my best effort was about ~15 of 24 rounds perfect.)

    • Re:April Fools is done... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Friday April 01, 2005 @07:31PM (#12117524) Homepage
      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.

      Sure, Slashdot is stupid and there are a lot of lame jokes out there, but this is one of the better ones. The download is on a page with other legitimate software, and links to a legitimate-looking review on MacWorld magazine's site. It's a real downloadable app, which actually runs, sits for 10 minutes apparently doing nothing, then wipes your screen clean with a dust cloth. Of course it's a prank, but it's a very good one.

      (During the 10 minutes, it gradually darkens your screen, slow enough that most people won't notice.)
  • kerosene soot, you know. gets all over the insides. say, who's the new gatekeepers at slashdot, they have a fine sense of news and are adept at sorting out all the political lies. these guys should take over for good. anybody hear any good rumors about the new apple device for bathrooms called the iPeed?

    • No, it's iPoo [pocket-lint.co.uk].

      "A UK company started up by a distant relative of the inventor of the toilet, has created a new handheld GPS device that allows you to locate and then get directions to the nearest toilet in the UK."

      Actually, I have here (somewhere) a rather tattered copy of the obscure book, "Where to Go in London". It's circa 1969(?) reviews about free toilet facilities in the city, and not about possible gay sex-friendly places as some might think. It's actually some guy's published opinions on the be

  • The Real Trick (Score:5, Insightful)

    by miyako ( 632510 ) <miyako AT gmail DOT com> on Friday April 01, 2005 @07:45PM (#12117597) Homepage Journal
    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?)
    • Neat idea. Just make sure you're adjusting the brightness of the backlight, and not the pixel values of the LCD itself.

      It would probably be easier to implement this on display technologies with illuminating pixels, such as OLEDs.
    • My PowerBook actually has light sensors in it, just under the speakers on the right and left and side. I think it's an option in certain models, the ones that have backlight keyboard support (though it might also be in the ones that don't have backlit keyboards, I'm not sure).

      It automatically dims the display, and adjusts the brightness of the backlit keyboard depending on the ambiant light level. Quite handy to have the screen dimmed automatically when I'm in a low light situation.

      Although, I have this d

  • screen shot (Score:5, Informative)

    by Phroggy ( 441 ) * <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Friday April 01, 2005 @07:58PM (#12117684) Homepage
    Grab.app wasn't able to properly capture the dustcloth while it was moving, but this should give you some idea [webwizardry.net] of what Screen Cleaner Pro looks like.

  • The Taco poissons d'avril have been a bit overboard this year.

    Doesn't MonsterCable sell a "screen cleaner" product that costs about fifty bucks for 100mL? It's supposed to be "clumpy" so that it doesn't drain down into the CRT housing where the bunny feathers and dead caterpillars live.

  • Watch out for the occasional side effect ... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ... where it alters the gamma of the user.

    One user, now being transported to an undisclosed military base in Nevada, said, "I tried this screen cleaner program, and all of a sudden, I felt ... RRRRAAAAARRRRGGGGGHHH .... HULK SMASH!!!!!!!"

  • Easter Eggs meet April Fools. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Type in "hector" or "andrew" while SCP is cleaning your screen.

  • Re: ScreenCleaner Pro (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Aww, it's too bad that this program isn't available for Windows 95 or 3.1. :( I could use that program. I'll try to find a Mac G5 to connect my monitor to.
  • I did think there was something wrong with my LCD monitor until I cleaned the crap off the screen!
  • "the analyzation"?? Is that the same as the analysis? Sounds like Dubya is making these April Fool's stories up now.
  • I'm serious. You really should install this software (assuming you're on OS X). It's actually quite amusing.

    As for the Easter Eggs, Hector is actually quite cute. The rest of them, well... ;)

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