So, I just picked up an other wise nice Indigo iMac G3 400. The screen has some issues and I'm not sure what is wrong where, or how to fix it. Pics:
This shows how the screen dims. It's almost perfect at the far left and worsens to a dim, hard to see fuzzy condition on the right.
This shows someof the color bleeding on the right half of the display. Notice the edges of the text box.
Any tips or ideas? The firmware shows 4.1.9f1, and it did a really basic install of 10.2 nicely, so that shouldn't be an issue. This persists through all modes of use, and doesn't go away after time while in use.
failing analog board perhaps? have you opened it and seen any obviously damaged or leaky capacitors or burnt resistors?
I have seen this before and it's generally a component that sets the scan timing has failed, or something along the lines of that. You might just want to find another PAV, or do rackmount.
I know that there is nothing wrong as far as magnets being near the screen, as the degausing would fix that. So, that's obviously not that. I just think you have a component failure. The choice is now of whether you want to try the repair, or just find a new PAV system to use.
Erg. Dang PAV barods are enough to drive a guy nuts. This is the second SL 400 that I gotten, and both are likely to have failing/failed PAV boards. The case on this machine is great, nice shiny and glowing. Really clean. It's just got the wonky screen and several missing case screws from when some bonehead removed the HDD. I *hate* when lazy people can't take the 2 mins to put the screws back into something they took apart. It's nt like iMac case screws are useful for much other than iMacs. Anyway, I need to hook this up to an external monitor soon and check the output there. I'm ure it will be fine, but it's one less thing to think about. In the pics it was booting into the Ubuntu 5.10 PPC LiveCD. I didn't let it finish as it took so dang long to boot on 128MB RAM. I did get teh X display issues with the LiveCD prodded out and got full video, and this problem happens in all stages of Linux booting too. Thus, it's most surely not software based.
As I work on this more (I'm posting from it right now) I notice that the darker areas have better color headng off to the right. Lighter areas such as the white background of this page fade into a smoke stained color, like the cases of beige Macs get sometimes.