Kudos to ViewSonic for making their horizontal and vertical focus controls easy to find. My wonderful 19" monitor has been looking a bit fuzzy of late, so I decided to open it up and see if it just needed some fine tuning. I had to scrape off some kind of green resin they put on the dials at the factory to keep them in place, but I was able to re-adjust my screen's vertical and horizontal focus controls and get it sharp as when it was new. While I don't advise people tinkering with high voltage equipment unless they know what they're doing, it's worth remembering that if your screen has lost its sharpness and the front pannel controls aren't helping it doesn't mean the monitor is junk, it may just need a tune-up. However, to adjust the focus it does have to be turned ON at the time and plugged into a computer, which means you have to be a bit cautious and not touch anything inside the monitor that you're not supposed to.
If anyone remembers televisions before they went digital, they had a few fun knobs on the back for things like vertical hold, horizontal hold, sharpness (or focus), brightness, etc. Some of these old-school analog controls still exist to a degree, but they're set at factory and are internal to the televisions and monitors sold today. On a lot of them the focus control(s) and possibly a brightness control are situated in the left rear quadrant of the left side of the unit. There may be other potentiometer controls inside, but those really shouldn't be tinkered with. Adjusting the focus is pretty simple, and it usually needs just a very fine adjustment to correct any blurred text. It beats paying $200+ for a new screen, especially when you really like the one you have!
Just make sure you REALLY know what you're doing before opening one of these things up. Even with the power off there are good-sized capacitors that can shock the hell out of you and some can even deliver a serious enough jolt to stop your heart, or at the least give a very nasty burn, especially in the case of large television screens. You can also do irreversible damage to the monitor if you put a screwdriver where it doesn't belong, so be very careful, or (even better) find someone who fixes televisions to help you.
|