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LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) monitors are now somewhat the de facto standard when choosing a display device with a new machine or when replacing aging monitors. Although they have become a lot more prevalent, certain batches that come off the production line and into shops are still plagued with ‘dead pixel(s)’ which has not gone away since it’s inception. As such, it’s pretty important to test it the moment you buy one to ensure it’s free of defects as warranties with regards to this matter can be pretty prickly.

Here’s a quote from Wikipedia’s entry on quality control of LCDs:

Some LCD panels have defective transistors, causing permanently lit or unlit pixels which are commonly referred to as stuck pixels or dead pixels respectively. Unlike integrated circuits, LCD panels with a few defective pixels are usually still usable. It is also economically prohibitive to discard a panel with just a few defective pixels because LCD panels are much larger than ICs.

I’m not going to bore you with more explanation of what stuck and dead pixels mean (click on the links to check the Wikipedia entries on those), so I’ll get on with the nifty tool which would allow you do easily test your new LCD monitor you just got is free of dead/stuck pixels which is called Dead Pixel Buddy.

It’s a small zip file download which just contains the executable and does not require any installation. Just unzip and run it and an application similar to what is shown below should appear:

A hassle free way to test is just to hit ‘Test Cycle’ and it would cycle through all the colours from 1-6 every 10 seconds (default value, can be changed to whatever you want). Alternatively, you could hit the numbers on your keyboard one by one to go through all of it or by clicking around with the mouse.

Happy testing! :)