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Free Fix: The Stuck Pixel
18 April 2023
In the days of CRT monitors, there was no such thing as a stuck pixel. We lived a life of blissful ignorance and the nuisance a tiny little dot of bright color can cause. Until, that is, the advent of LCD screens on laptops.
JScreenFix. Just drag the pixel fixer over the stuck pixel and run the fixer, which quickly varies the pattern, for 10 minutes.
There was a concession by manufacturers that LCD screens might have up to five troublesome pixels. More than that and they would replace the screen or laptop as defective, if memory serves.
Better manufacturing nearly eliminated that problem on new screens but time wearies us all. It isn't unexpected to have problem pixels on older hardware.
And we have older hardware. So we were dismayed but not surprised when we started seeing this bright green pixel in the middle of our Photoshop edits.
We tried a few incantations and the old finger rub technique to massage the connections around the pixel but they were equally ineffective.
We thought we were onto something when we tried moving the hinge on the laptop screen thinking the cable might need to be exercised. We do that on our remote controls, opening them up to rotate the batteries and thus making a better connection.
But no.
It may seem like a little thing (well, a pixel is little) but it isn't a minor annoyance particularly when it comes to working with photos. When we started seeing three of them, we were on the verge of buying a new machine,. But that's when the cavalry rode in.
In our case, the cavalry was JScreenFix, a free online utility that fires a rapid series of pixel changes within a circumscribed window you position on the screen where your stuck pixel reigns.
JSCreenFix works on LCDs and OLEDs using HTML5 and JavaScript in your browser to exercise the transistors that control the stuck pixel and its neighbors. You position the window over the problem area and let it run for at least 10 minutes.
Which is what we did. And we haven't seen a stuck pixel for several weeks now.