Monitor tinted red after lightning strike...?

[NickThissen]

Hey,

Last night we had a pretty bad storm and I think we had a lightning strike (at least somewhere close). All the power went out (while I was using my PC) and we didn't have any TV or internet until just now (like 14 hours later). When I turned on my PC again today though I noticed that my second monitor (a TFT screen I think) is tinted red... It appears as though it can no longer display green colors or something. Could that be possible? I am using a surge protector so that's pretty strange... I'm pretty sure it has to do with the storm though lol, would be a huge coincidence otherwise. Can I give this up for insurance, or can it be a coincidence and it just died of old age? I don't suppose there's anything I can do to fix it right?

Thanks!

[GamerMax5]

Each modern LCD monitor has controls built into it that allow you to control which colors appear more vibrant on the screen than others. The colors you can pick from are usually only red, green, and blue with some higer-end monitors providing you with controls over slightly different colors. Each menu configuration is different for each vendor so I can't really direct you to the correct menu location but if you navigate through and adjust the color settings to balance out the colors and you're still getting a red tint thoughout the screen, there's a chance that you may have a damaged LCD panel which, on a consumer end, basically means that you'd have to replace the monitor entirely.

The only way to chalk this up to insurance would be if you could prove that it was indeed the lightning strike that caused the damage to the panel but you usually can't tell just by looking at the components. This being said, if you can prove that any other components, either connected to the computer or the surge protector (please know that a surge protector and power strip are two entirely different things!!!), were damaged at the time of the strike due to the lightning, then you have a pretty good shot at getting the insurance to cover it.

[NickThissen]

I've tried playing with the color settings but didn't work. That wouldn't make sense either, I didn't touch those settings at all so how could they have changed?

Also, as far as I can tell nothing else has been damaged. The PC, speakers, other monitor, etc are all connected to the same surge protector, yet only my second monitor broke. Maybe it was just much weaker than the other stuff because I think it's older...

[GamerMax5]

I've tried playing with the color settings but didn't work. That wouldn't make sense either, I didn't touch those settings at all so how could they have changed?

Just a suggestion. Usually that kind of stuff happens (trust me I've seen it happen plenty of times as I've been working with monitors for quite some time) and in your original post it didn't mention anything about adjusting the color through the menus so I thought I'd suggest that first.

[NickThissen]

Well, I bought a new monitor yesterday (I wanted it for a while), a nice 24" Full HD screen

I plugged it in, and it turns out it wasn't the monitor that was fried... The new screen had the same problem as my old screen!

I had a look at the back of my PC where I connect both of my screens (I've got two). It turns out that my videocard has DVI outputs, whereas both my old monitors only supported VGA. So I was using two DVI to VGA converter plug thingies. It turns out one of them is causing the problem (probably fried it). Luckily, my new screen does support DVI so I don't need to use the plug anymore, I have now just connected the new screen via DVI and the old screen via DVI to VGA and both now work perfectly.

Bit of luck on my side I guess that it's just the converter plug that is broken; it could have been my video card which would have been much more expensive to replace.
So now I've got two nice flat screens (well, one very nice one and one crappy small one) instead of a two small (17") monitors (one huge CRT). Going from 17" to 24" is a huge step and takes some getting used to, but I like it alot so far

The only downside really is coding in Visual Studio. The screen is so wide that the code is mostly on the left side of the screen and I have to keep looking to the left lol. I'll have to reposition the other tool windows (I've got them on my second monitor right now) so that it works out nicer.