Black Pixels in our Friday Bash Thread: RMA yoyo between customers, trade and manufacturer

The first one I bought from Office Partner GmbH had a whole cluster of at least three dead black pixels at the bottom left, which I had never seen in this form before. So everything was neatly packed up again and sent back. Always in the hope that everything would get better.

However, I didn’t even use the replacement copy because the upper left corner and correspondingly a part of the left and upper edge were already open.

It was even worse than it looks in the photo, because you could see inside the monitor. Apparently the back part of the frame was not attached properly, at least that was my guess. Until I found out on the third and fourth copies that they had a similar problem. However, on the later specimens, the upper right corner was affected. After looking closely, I saw that the back was attached with clips. Now these had popped off at the corner. Carefully, and with some force, I reattached the upper right corner.

The reason for the open corner in three of four copies of the same monitor remains uncertain. Perhaps work was done carelessly at the factory. Another possibility is that the plastic clips popped off during shipping due to shock. All the packaging had no visible damage and the monitors were brand new and unopened. However, I found the Styrofoam around the panel to be rather thin, and my impression is that sturdier packaging would have certainly benefited the monitor. I also returned this second copy to Office Partner GmbH and changed dealers.

Assuming that I was just unlucky, the MSI monitor was ordered a third time from Computer Universe. The third copy had no dead pixels, but had the worst illumination and bright homogeneity I have ever seen in a monitor.

The center of the image was yellowish on the right, like backlight bleed on a bright background or a “dirty screen effect,” and bluish on the left. The areas around the edges were noticeably darker and equally bluish, and as if that wasn’t enough, there was a light blue stripe all along the left, top, and right edges of the image, a sort of “vignetting effect”.

On top of that, the gamma values were 2.6, 2.7 with the EIZO monitor test and thus quite off. Basically, a homogeneous illumination is more difficult to achieve with larger panels from 27 inches and accordingly most difficult with ultrawide monitors. However, if the manufacturer has made an effort and selected the panels to some extent, the deviations are within limits. Even the best LCD panels have small deviations in homogeneity, but they are measurable and not perceptible. If the difference between the brightest center of the image and the darker edges or other areas of the image field is more than about 8-10%, these differences are visible.

The poor illumination bothered me so much that I wrote to MSI support. I was offered to pick up the monitor and send it to the service center (I think it’s in Poland) to check if the deviations are within the “manufacturing tolerances” or not. Since it was two weeks before Christmas and the procedure would probably have taken a few weeks with the risk of the service center finding the monitor “okay”, I decided to send back this third one as well, with which I was dissatisfied anyway, and close the whole story once and for all and look for another monitor. Until the end of December, when I saw that the monitor was on sale at Alternate and ordered it a fourth time. A colossal mistake, but that should not obscure MSI’s responsibility as the manufacturer of this monitor. I kept the fourth copy despite its flaws, which are clearly within “manufacturing tolerances,” but they are flaws nonetheless.

What is meant is the dark, dead pixel in the center left, which fortunately is not very noticeable. It is smaller and brighter than a dot in Word. The illumination and bright homogeneity are better, but deviations are still perceptible.

The left edge is darker and has a blue cast, and the light blue vignette along all edges is also present, though weaker. What suffers more noticeably in this specimen is the black homogeneity. I keep reading the blanket statement “IPS-Glow/BLB” in forums. IPS glow is a weakness of the technology and (unfortunately) belongs to it. Backlight bleed, on the other hand, is a flaw because the illumination is inhomogeneous. The fourth model is affected by the area on the upper left and also on the lower left.

Annoyed by the whole story, I decided to keep the monitor, as written above. Nonetheless, I asked Alternate if an additional discount is possible because of the pixel error. Indeed, I was refunded 50€ and together with the offer, the monitor ended up costing me 519 instead of 679€. Here’s my recommendation to everyone: If your new monitor has small defects, like a dead, dark pixel on one edge, and you still want to keep the device, talk to the retailer (the case should also be documented with photos if possible). It is quite possible to get a small discount, because the dealers have to sell defective and returned monitors as B-goods anyway.

Conclusion and summary

Of course, I wouldn’t buy this MSI monitor again, even if the price was around 300€. As a customer, you have a right to a defect-free product even with a cheap monitor. My Samsung, Full-HD, 60 Hz, TN monitor cost just 190€ in 2011. Apart from the basic TN weakness in contrast and color reproduction, it had no defects, is still running today and has been placed in the family in the meantime. The MSI is superior to my previous Asus monitor in every respect. However, a panel of inferior manufacturing quality is installed, which does not justify the current price of at least 649€ at all.

From this perspective, my older Asus IPS has the better homogeneous panel and it has a better overall finish: the stand and front are made of aluminum, the back of high-quality plastic. The MSI, on the other hand, is made of cheap-looking plastic and doesn’t feel at all like a €649 WQHD monitor. Because of the panel, you could criticize Sharp here, but the monitor says MSI, which I feel has a duty to perform decent quality control. What MSI has delivered with this monitor, I can only call a disgrace.

Through my work in academia, I’ve worked with quite a few monitors at universities, libraries, archives, and museums over the past 20 years, in the last decade exclusively with IPS. As a rule, these were much cheaper office monitors compared to the MSI. Never have I seen such consistently poor illumination on various copies of the same monitor. Again, I haven’t found pixel defects in about 15 years either, this time two of the four specimens had that, the first one even several. Privately, this is the first time I have ever returned a monitor, let alone several of them.

At this point I would like to thank @FritzHunter, who showed great interest in my case through a discussion in the forum. This led to him sending all my photos and defect descriptions, along with the serial number of all four monitors, to MSI for a review of what went wrong in manufacturing and/or quality control. If there are any results from the internal investigation, only MSI knows (or not). In any case, I can only advise against the MSI Optix MAG274QRX. The probability is too high that you get a functioning monitor, but with various flaws: Pixel errors, unclean workmanship and, above all, poor illumination with visible deviations in the bright and black image homogeneity. What I experienced with the four copies of this monitor far exceeds any “panel lottery”.

Basically, I will think twice before buying an MSI monitor again in the future, regardless of what kind of panel is installed. In my case, there was no quality control or even one that only took place at the customer. According to the stickers on the back, all four were manufactured in January/February 2022. One could suspect a “bad batch” here. The purpose of quality control is precisely to prevent products of a “bad batch” from reaching customers. Again and again, I read the equally sweeping statement “LCD/IPS scrap” in forums. If something is junk, then it mainly concerns the quality control of the manufacturers and less the panel technology.

Regarding the quality control, I would like to quote the forum member @ccr, who wrote about the review of the Cooler Master Tempest GP27U: “What I don’t find so great: the panel bends backwards to the side edges, which looks like the curved edge displays of Samsung phones. According to forums, a common production defect, but due to lack of availability I did not want to dare to try an exchange. In practice, and at normal sitting distance, I don’t notice it annoyingly, but it’s there, you can’t miss it, and it shouldn’t be on a monitor in this price range.” Yes, it shouldn’t be on a monitor in this price range, and basically something like this should be an isolated occurrence and not a “common production defect” that finds its way onto the market because apparently there is no quality control.

Important editorial note

Today’s article comes from community member Wellenbrecher and was of course checked by us. We already talked to MSI Germany about these cases in August and have now waited three months for detailed feedback. MSI assured us that they are not aware of an accumulation of such RMA cases, so we have to assume that the defective monitors were not sent to MSI by the retailers at all, but were repaired internally and then returned to the market (perhaps as B-goods). However, as long as nothing is reported back to the manufacturers or returned, they naturally cannot register an accumulation of error patterns. And so, in the end, everyone believes they have found the most elegant way. Except for the customer, who received everything but a functioning monitor. Quality management on the part of the manufacturer should be urgently improved here, and I’m sure it could have affected any supplier in the same way.

Feel free to write in the comments how it was with your monitors so far. Were you immediately satisfied or did you also have one or the other monitor odyssey behind you? To be fair, I can well imagine, as most of you are happy with your monitors, including MSI monitors. At the same time, I’d like to ask you to remain factual and avoid sweeping statements against panel technologies and individual manufacturers.