Two years ago I bought four of these, then pretty expensive, 1,600 x 1,200 pixel flat screen monitors.

They are wonderful and about perfect for all purposes including the difficult tasks, for different reasons, of photo retouching and gaming.

However, after this time the first one showed a strange defect. After switching on power, they drop dead for several minutes, the time getting longer and longer by the month.

The symptom is that the monitor drops dead entirely. The green light goes off, the monitor does not react to any key press, and the screen is totally black.

This seems to happen only when it is connected through a (digital) DVI cable, not when connected through an analog VGA cable.

Since they were still under warranty, we sent the first failed monitor back to the local ViewSonic representation and got it replaced. The new one does not (yet) show the problem, but now the second one does, and is going to be sent back soon too.

This raises the suspicion that the first failure was not an unlikely one-time occurrence, but a design flaw, befalling all monitors of this type or at least of this batch. Hence my question: If you have the same monitor, do you also observe this particular failure mode?

Keywords: self-destruct self-destructs 1600 1200 flaw defective