I'm travelling in China, staying at backpacker hostels and cheap hotels. Many cheap hotels don't have Wi-Fi but have a desktop computer in the room with Internet access.
The hotel I'm staying at now in an obscure city has severe blurring/smudging/smearing from left to right across the monitor. Similar to ghosting but one blurred image getting fainter to the right, rather than a secondary faded copy of the main image.
The photo is out of focus due to my cheap camera not being great at macro, but the smearing is still pretty evident.
I've never seen this on a flat panel monitor before but it's pretty common on old-style CRT monitors with actual picture tubes (cathod ray tubes).
Since I'm in a cheap hotel and since it's in China, I'm wondering if this could be caused by having some kind of "splice" or "splitter" between the monitor and the computer. Because I remember trying one of those devices many years ago when I had a CRT monitor and got a similar streaking effect.
I don't want to move the computer and fiddle with the wires and I know the monitor is bolted or glued in place anyway and it's a tiny room. So I'm asking more about the general concept and don't actually care if some guy at the front desk is looking at what I type here.
So generally, if you see a picture that blurs on a flat panel display, is having a splice in the monitor cable one potential reason that could happen?
Or is that only possible with analog/CRT monitors and therefore more likely to be just a worn out display or some other unrelated issue? Possibly VGA vs some more modern cable?
Best Answer
It's not a cable issue. Each individual pixel in an LCD is lit up separately, and with digital (unlike analog), smearing such as you describe is not cable related, so it's just a flaky monitor.