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I had to RMA my monitor because the color went bad on the right side of the screen. Like red became pink on the right side of the monitor. I bought it 8 months ago. Was having a slide show playing 24/7 cause my screen to go bad so quickly, or was it I just got a bad screen? The brand was Samsung, the monitor was 600 dollars.

I know having a slide show playing 24/7 shortens its life. But 8 months? I'm thinking at least 4 or 5 years?

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There is no definitive answer to this. Mean time to failure is just that - an average. If you took 1000 screens & ran them all 24/7 some would die in a week, some would be fine after 10 years, the rest would form a bell-curve somewhere between.

I used to install & maintain such screens for use in in-store advertising, so they'd probably be running 16 hours a day not 24 - but the same pattern emerges. Some die in a week, some go on forever.

So long as you don't get static image burn-in, which you shouldn't on a slide show, then just run it til it dies.

Screens that only get used an hour a day will die eventually too - not necessarily lasting longer than those on constantly. I had a Mac Pro running as a 24/7 server that lasted over a decade. Never slept, never shut down or rebooted except for system updates.

This, btw, is why we have legally-enforced warranty periods [different per territory, but similar in essence]. So long as you use a product 'reasonably' - which precludes using it for football or as a beer receptacle - then if you get one of those that dies early, the law deems it a manufacturing issue & you get a shiny new one.

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  • Actually, some hardware lasts longer when run 24/7 than if it's turned on/off daily.
    – harrymc
    Oct 15, 2021 at 15:21
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    Same experience here with info-displays in our buildings on several sites. About 100 screens (48" TV's used as monitor). Installed in 2012. Running a screensaver with a mixture of multiple videos and still images all day long. Timer switches them on at 6:30 AM and off at 7:30 PM. One went bad after 10 weeks. 2 others after about 1 year. The others are still fine. Some color distortion (not enough to warrant replacement) has started to become visible on about 10% of them in the last few moths. We intend to replace the whole lot next year when they are 10 years old.
    – Tonny
    Oct 15, 2021 at 15:22
  • @harrymc - indeed, but you will never know if yours dies at, say 5 years, whether you got one that would have lasted 10 if used differently.
    – Tetsujin
    Oct 15, 2021 at 15:22
  • @Tonny - the company I installed these for - over 1000 of them - had plans to replace at 5 years, in fact it made more sense to replace them after 10 [which we did eventually] & in the meantime have a float of about 100 we used as swap-ins [so we never did repairs on-site,. just pulled them back to the service dept]. These were custom-built for us, but of course just using off-the-shelf components.
    – Tetsujin
    Oct 15, 2021 at 15:24
  • @Tetsujin We initially also calculated with 5-6 years for replacement. On our project we initially bought 15 extra as spares. And because the final number we needed turned out the 5 lower than ordered we ended up with 20 spares. Used only 3 of those so far. May have to use all of these to replace the worst ones before we do the full replacement next year. We seriously looking at buying very cheap basic low-end TV's now. We only need Full HD. Big brand TVs without SmartTV non-sense are almost non-existent and cost 2x to 3x as much. Even if they don't last that long it will be cheaper.
    – Tonny
    Oct 15, 2021 at 15:41

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