Find and Fix Dead Pixels With Your Browser!

by Lee Mathews Aug 26th 2008

You've probably heard of Dead Pixel Buddy, a free app that helps you locate dead or stuck pixels on your LCD monitor. One of our devoted readers has sent us an interesting alternative that runs in your browser.

Willy Ci has coded it as part of his portfolio, and it's elegantly simple. Pick a color with the palette tool, click go full screen, and your monitor is instantly awash in glorious pixel-hunting color.

Since it's browser-based, it'll run on any platform (as long as Adobe Flash is supported).

Both machines I used for testing had a slight issue escaping from full screen - the chooser didn't reappear, and my mouse pointer vanished. Simply mousing up to the tab bar and right-click reloading the tab solved the problem.

Once you've pinpointed the trouble spots, head over to killdeadpixel.com and see if you can't revive them with their trippy animated gif. Switching to one of the fullscreen modes makes stuck pixels easy to spot by giving you a black background to work with. No guarantees it'll wake them up, but it's worth a shot since most manufacturers won't warranty a screen with fewer than three problematic pixels.

Tags: dead pixel, dead pixels, DeadPixel, DeadPixels, display, lcd, monitor, stuck, stuck pixel, StuckPixel

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

an observer said 8:01AM on 8-27-2008

Shouldn't it be called "revivedeadpixel.com"?

Seems to make more sense since you can't kill something that's already dead.

ronmoses said 10:11AM on 8-27-2008

"...FEWER than three problematic pixels," please. Come on, you use this language for a living. Learn your tools.

Vlad said 8:28AM on 10-01-2008

Well this is a very usefull piece of software. but you have to be able to differentiate between DEAD pixels and STUCK pixels. It`s a big difference.

DEAD pixels cannot be fixed because they are getting no power to their matrix, so are not activated in any way.

STUCK pixels CAN be fixed, they are subpixels or the entire pixel structure stuck on a specific spectral scope.

Hope this helps, have a nice day :)

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