The pixels of my Empeg's display are not uniformly bright. There seem to be horizontal bands that are dimmer than the rest of the display. It can be seen on some of the visualizations that print large areas of solid white pixels. Is this normal?

I don't think that is normal. Mine doesn't do that and I've not seen anything like that happen.

Reg_2845 Serial #00173

They're not really DARK lines or anything. Just faintly dimmer than the others. It's so subtle that you don't notice it unless you have a frozen vis that's made of mostly smooth white pixels. Attached is a .GIF file that approximates what I'm talking about.

It looks like the kind of thing where one might say "Oh, that's just normal for that kind of display". It's been there since I got the unit, so it's not like it's something that's cropped up recently or anything.

Look at the .GIF file and tell me whether your display looks like that.

Same here. I was wondering about the same question, but since it's not distrubing in any way i don't care.

J.

Hmmmm.... given that you said yours was bought second hand, and you have mentioned your display appears to be a bit "cocked", this makes me wonder if you haven't got some subtle damage here. I have just checked mine and I have no visible banding on the same visual; is anyone else seeing this?

Yes, I have the banding, too. But, like others, I didn't (don't) think it's a real problem, just a side-effect of the type of screen used.


_~= Dearing =~_
"WAY too happy about having #99."

Thanks, Dearing and Jfranke. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't the only one. Like I said, it's not a problem.

Although the post by Schofiel seems to indicate that there is a such thing as a perfect display. I hope I haven't opened a can of worms, here...

I was going to mention this at some point, but on my unit, there are occasions when a vertical band or two of pixels on the far right side of the display are extremely bright when compared to the rest of the display. It is most obvious when the hard drive icon appears.

The strange thing is that this only happens sometimes. Most of the time, the display is "normal". In fact, I can usually make the bright pixels return to normal by resetting the unit (by removing power).

-v

I had/have this same problem. At first I thought my display had died... but a power cycle "fixed" it.

I immediately mailed empeg, and Hugo explained it was a known bug. I'm not sure if it's acceptable
to repost his mail to me, but the gist of it was that he knows it has something to do with the display
PIC losing track of where the start of the fame is. He also said that he's only seen the problem three
times himself (and gave me the impression he hadn't gotten any other reports at that time) so hadn't
been able to reliably reproduce it for debugging.

That response was enough for me, just to know that it wasn't an indicator of premature display failure.
I was very worried it was a hardware problem and was happy to hear it was just a software bug.
I don't expect to have it fixed, since this kind of problem isn't necessarily field upgradable (removing
the PIC from the display board and reprogramming it) for most people.

I saw the problem 6 weeks ago, and haven't seen it since, despite using the empeg for many hours a
day, every day. If the problem does show up again, I know a reboot will fix it. IMHO, this puts it in the
class of "minor annoyance".

Let me publicly thank Hugo and the empeg crew for their honesty about disclosing the existence of
such problems, and the promptness of their responses to customers.

-j

That's just perfectly normal for this kind of display :-)

As someone already pointed out, the bright bar at the side thing is a known bug which occurs rarely.

Rob

...for the record, the two most outter right pixel rows on my unit are usually bright...
-mark

...proud to have one of the first Mark I units

All displays have banding, which is a variable in the display manufacture: some are better than others, but all are within spec of the manufacturer. We did bring up the issue with the display suppliers, who assured us that the variability seen is within tolerances. The darker lines are areas underneath the filament heater wires.

Hugo

Ah, thanks Hugo.

The VFD kicks arse, lines or no lines. I'm glad you guys went with it instead of LCD.

The thing is so bright that it bothers my wife when we're driving at night. Now that's a bright display.