HOWTO: Remove Burn-in and Ghosting on your LCD Panel
With the pandemic continuing and no real end in sight, those of us who work from home are putting in extended hours at work, and extended hours on our computers and office equipment, including our eyes and monitors.
My monitors have started to develop burn-in and ghosting on parts of the screen where I keep common apps running like my browser windows, chat apps and other services.
Modern monitors lack the “degaussing” feature that was popular years ago on older CRT monitors to help remove those ghost images.
Fear not! There’s still a way to help remove ghosting, and it doesn’t involve running a screensaver! You can run an “LCD scrub” behind your windows as you work (or in a cron job, systemd unit or other time-based scheduler). Here’s how!
First, install the xscreensaver-data-extra package from your favorite package archive. In Ubuntu, that’s a simple sudo apt install xscreensaver-data-extra command. Then, run the following one-liner to target your ‘root’ window (Desktop):
/usr/lib/xscreensaver/lcdscrub -random -noinstall -window -window-id \
$(xwininfo -root -tree | grep Desktop | awk '{print $1}') -spread 10This will run the lcdscrub utility in your ‘root’ display, scrubbing the screen behind all of your current windows. Of course, you can close those windows around and make it more effective.
Here’s a quick video showing how this works:
Running this on a regular basis is a good idea, so you can avoid the kind of burn-in that can prematurely age your display. Since it may be difficult (or expensive) to replace monitors with chip and electronic shortages, you’ll want to extend the life as long as you can, before inventory becomes available for replacements.