Strange dual-monitor problem

480sparky

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For the past 4 or 5 years, I've used two monitors on my computer as it's nice to have that much real estate to spread things out on. But a week ago, my second monitor started doing some weird things.

First, it took on a reddish tint. I tried to correct it, but to no avail. Now.... it's green.

A screen shot isn't affected by this green tint, but here's the weird part: I use a utility program called Instant Eyedropper. It allows me to select a small area on either monitor and pick up the HTML, RGB or HSB colors for either a small group of pixels, or an individual pixel if I desire. But this app will only return 255:255:255 no matter where on the screen it's placed and what color is really under it, even if I KNOW it's 0,0,0.

My first thought was I had a monitor going south. But since the Instant Eyedropper won't function properly on that monitor, it makes me think it's a driver or even possibly a video card issue.

Anyone got any ideas?
 
The first thing I would do is to attach it to another device ... if you got anything else to connect it to.
 
I swapped them, but the same monitor is green.

What I can't figure out is why the eyedropper app is affected. It should get it's data right from the video card, not the monitor itself.
 
If it's the same physical monitor that's green, it's toast. As cheap as they are these days, they're expendable. I'd likely get two new identical monitors, to ease the eyes between one another. keep the old good monitor as a spare for you or someone else.

On the other hand, if it's the same video card 'port' that's causing green, it may be the cable or the port. Swap cables and see what happens. If the 'green' switched monitors, it's the cable. If not, it's the video card.
 
I tried the monitor on my laptop. Despite the low resolution available on my laptop (1300 x something), it displays colors correctly.

So it must be my video card.
 
I would roll back the video card driver first. Windows update may have replaced the native driver with a windows one. One way to check is to go to add remove programs, make sure you have show windows update checked, and scroll down to approximately the date you started seeing the problem and see if windows installed a display adapter. If your still not sure check for the latest, native, video card driver and install it. If that fails, get a new card.
 
RGB cord? make sure it's still firmly connected.
 
Monitor end. My video card has one VGA and one DVI-D output. Both monitors have both input options though. So there's only one way to swap them.
 
I once had a bad pin on an old VGA cable - lost green
 
Monitor end.
Wait... you swapped them at the monitor end, which means the monitor in question got not only got a different video channel, but a different cable and went from analog to digital (or the other way around), and still the problem stayed with the monitor? But when you moved the suspect monitor to a different computer it displayed correctly?

That doesn't make sense, unless the problem is with the monitor and it's resolution-sensitive. (The laptop output being lower resolution.)
 
What kind of graphics card do you have and what kind of monitors are they? One possibility is that this is a monitor profile issue, which could potentially be resolved depending on the driver. Your laptop can almost certainly output the monitor's native resolution with some fiddling and that test would tell use quite a bit.
 
I'd have to do some digging to find the model number, but I remember it's something like a GForce. Monitors are Samsung P2350s.

Laptop is an über-cheapie. Maximum resolution is 1300 or so.
 

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