Dead and Stuck Pixels

Check which one it is before doing anything, because only one of them ever recovers. A dead pixel gets no power and stays black on every image. A stuck pixel is powered but locked to one colour, and those sometimes come back.

Ten seconds of testing decides it: display a full white screen, then a full black one. Black dot on white is dead. Coloured or white dot on black is stuck.

A note on this guide: this rests on how these panels fail and on how manufacturer pixel policies are written, rather than on panels repaired here. See how we test.

The problem, as it appears

A dot. On a new monitor, usually, and noticed within the first hour on a plain background — after which it becomes very difficult to look at anything else.

The panic follows a standard path: is it spreading, is it covered, is it worth returning, and is there something you can do that does not involve packaging the thing back up.

Why the first search result disappoints

Because the two most-recommended fixes address one of the two faults, and one of them can damage the panel.

Pixel-cycling videos rapidly flash colours to exercise a sub-pixel that has settled in one state. They work only on stuck pixels, and their real success rate is modest rather than the near-certainty the titles imply. They are still worth running, because they cost nothing and risk nothing.

Pressure methods — rubbing the spot, pressing through a cloth — are the ones to be careful about. Pressure on a liquid crystal panel can create defects that were not there, damage the diffuser behind it, or leave a permanent mark larger than the pixel. This is the single most commonly repeated fix and it is the only one with a real downside.

The uncomfortable answer is that a genuinely dead pixel has no consumer fix. It is a fault in the transistor driving that cell.

What actually matters

Confirm it is a pixel at all

Do this first, because two other things look identical and one of them wipes off.

A speck of dust or a mark on the surface reads exactly like a dead pixel until you look at it from an angle — a surface mark moves relative to the image, a pixel does not. A gentle clean rules it out and takes a minute; the right way to do it, without making a worse mark, is in cleaning a monitor without damaging it.

The white-and-black test

Full white, then full black, full screen, nothing else on the display.

• Black on white → dead. No power reaching it.
• Coloured or white on black → stuck. Powered, locked to one state.
• Visible on both → probably a surface mark, and worth cleaning again.

That distinction determines everything that follows, and almost nobody does it before searching for a fix.

Run the cycling video, then stop

For a stuck pixel: twenty minutes of a colour-cycling video pointed at that area is the whole of the no-risk approach. Some recover, most do not, and running it for hours does not improve the odds materially.

For a dead pixel it does nothing, which is the reason the test above comes first.

Read your specific pixel policy

The step that decides whether this is a return or something to live with, and it is more variable than people expect.

Manufacturers publish defective-pixel policies that allow a certain number of dead or stuck sub-pixels before a panel qualifies as faulty. A single pixel is almost always inside the allowance — which is why a return attempt usually fails and why people feel misled by it.

Two exceptions worth checking. Some premium lines advertise a zero-tolerance policy as a feature. And many retailers operate a general return window that is entirely separate from the manufacturer's pixel policy — if the monitor is new, that window is frequently the better route and the one people overlook while arguing about pixel counts.

A line is a different fault entirely

Worth separating, because the answer is much better.

A whole row or column failing is not a pixel problem. It points at a driver circuit or a connection at the panel edge, it is unambiguously a defect, and it has a far stronger warranty case than any number of scattered pixels.

If a line appears and comes and goes with pressure on the bezel or with temperature, that is a connection, and it is worth reporting immediately rather than monitoring.

The honest option nobody offers

Most people stop noticing. Faster than they expect, and reliably.

That is not a repair and it is worth saying, because the distress a single pixel causes in week one is a poor predictor of how much it will matter in month two. Deciding after a fortnight is a better decision than deciding on the first evening, and the retailer window is usually long enough to allow it.

If it is genuinely intolerable, the alternatives are the panel policy, the retailer window, or living with it — and the middle one is the one most likely to work.

The order to work in

1. Clean it. A surface mark looks identical and wipes off.
2. Full white, then full black. Ten seconds, and it decides the rest.
3. Cycling video for twenty minutes, if it is stuck.
4. Read the manufacturer's pixel policy for your specific model.
5. Check the retailer's return window separately — different rules, often better.
6. Do not press on it, or accept that you may make it worse.
7. Wait a fortnight before concluding it is unbearable.

The mistake to avoid

Pressing on the panel. It is the most-repeated fix on the internet, it is aimed at a fault that mostly does not respond to it, and it is the only method that can turn one bad pixel into a permanent blotch or a damaged diffuser. The advice survives because the people it worked for post about it and the people who made it worse quietly buy another monitor.

The second mistake is arguing the pixel policy when the retailer window is still open. The manufacturer's threshold is a published, defensible standard designed to exclude single-pixel claims, and it will not move. A general return, made promptly, has no such test to satisfy — and the time spent discovering that is frequently the time the window closes in. Other things that look like panel faults and are not are collected in screen fixes that are not a new monitor.