What Is Monitor Ghosting And How To Fix It?

Monitor ghosting can be the worst and most annoying issue on your PC. Facing ghosting on your monitor can frustrate you while decreasing your performance during any graphic work. This is a little path of pixels that follows development across your screen and ends up being a diverting presence.

Screen ghosting can likewise frequently take after dead pixels. This can make individuals think the issue is unfixable and it is simply something they’ll need to live with. 

Ghosting on Screen

Ghosting and various background images can affect the quality of the screen and during fast-moving screens, it can cause the pixel to become distorted. This phenomenon can impact your gaming experience and if left untreated it can cause eye strain and damage your eyesight.

These kinds of problems are most noticeable when playing a game or watching a movie with fast-moving scenes. It makes images look overlapped over each other causing distortion of images.

In this guide, we will discuss the causes of monitor ghosting and its fixes, so you can check whether your screen has monitor ghosting or not. Hopefully, you will be able to avoid or fix your monitor.

Causes of Monitor Ghosting on Screen:

There are a couple of reasons why monitor ghosting occurs and most commonly appears in LCD screens and rarely occurs in IPS screens. It happens because of the slow response of the monitor compared to what exactly is happening. The two images, one is slow response and another one is the actual image gets overlapped causing ghosting. LCD screens have a slow response time so there is a much larger risk of monitor ghosting in them.

There are two terms used that can cause monitor ghosting, one is refresh rate and another one is response time. Refresh rate means the number of times a monitor refreshes when showing a new image and response time means when moving from one image to another, the amount of time a monitor takes.

Both of these should be fully synchronized to avoid monitor ghosting, if you have a low refresh rate but a high response time, monitor ghosting will occur. Likewise, if you have a high refresh rate and low response time, the same will happen.

Normally, it is harder to detect monitor ghosting but it can be seen clearly when watching fast-moving scenes like in movies or FPS shooter games. The distortion can ruin your gaming experience, especially when playing online when you have ping latency that is keeping you back and another factor will affect your gameplay.

Fixing Monitor GhoIssues Similar To Monitor Ghosting

There are a couple of reasons for monitor ghosting and your screen may be affected by one of them, some of the reasons can be fixed while some need hardware change.

If you are experiencing monitor ghosting to the point where it has become harder to differentiate between actual and ghost images, a few ways can fix that problem. Most of the ways require a few steps and include slight changes to the monitor settings.

There are online tests available that you can use to detect monitor ghosting, and they will run images at a high speed of 60 fps and 60hz, if you see multiple images behind the actual image then you should follow these fixes.

Checking Your VGA/Monitor Cable

The first step is that you need to make sure that your monitor cable isn’t faulty or not fully plugged in. You can try replugging the monitor cable to see if the problem is still there and if there is still a problem, it is most likely the monitor cable is damaged.

A damaged monitor cable doesn’t transmit data as needed causing monitor ghosting. If you change your monitor cable and the problem persists, try checking the port you are plugging into. Sometimes, the port, where you plug the monitor cable, becomes faulty.

After you change the port and the cable but the problem is still there, then you should move on to the next fix as both your port and cable are fully functional.

Check Connected Devices

Sometimes the other connected devices affect your monitor display and cause monitor ghosting. The nearby connected devices like keyboards, speakers, printers can cause monitor ghosting and you need to keep your monitor far from these devices.

The best way to determine which device is causing this phenomenon is to check by disconnecting each device and determining if the problem is still there.

If you found a device that is causing monitor ghosting, you should change the device and buy a new one or connect it far away from your monitor. If you use it at the same time you are using the monitor, it will cause monitor ghosting. However, if you disconnected all the devices and the problem is still there, follow the next fix.

Adjusting Your Monitor Settings

As we discussed earlier, monitor ghosting is caused by the gap between the refresh rate and response time of the monitor.

You can alter the monitor settings and change the refresh rate and response time of the monitor to get rid of monitor ghosting. Normally, a high refresh rate and low response time will likely get rid of monitor ghosting.

Adjusting The Response Time

Nowadays monitor developers have made it easy to change the response time, they have included it in the menu of the monitor. And by pressing the on-screen display menu, you can change the response time of the monitor.

There are different brands of monitors and each brand uses different technology, we will try to cover the popular brands and if your monitor is not there you can check online or read the user’s manual provided by your brand.

For other brands, you can look in the settings for any function related to response time and enable it and adjust its speed and check if your monitor is still facing the same issue or not.

Adjust The Refresh Rate

If your monitor supports multiple refresh rates, you can change it and choose the max refresh rate your monitor can provide. In windows 10, you can easily see the refresh rate of your monitor and change it.

But remember your monitor should support multiple refresh rates and if it doesn’t you will not be able to change it. Follow these simple steps to adjust the refresh rate in Windows 10:

Windows 7 or below:

This will change the refresh rate to its max and hopefully resolve the issue that you were facing. If the problem remains, then try this last fix.

Updating Your Graphics Driver

Monitor ghosting is mostly due to issues in monitors but sometimes your GPU drivers are not compatible with your monitor and are causing monitor ghosting. Though it might not be the issue when everything else fails, updating your drivers will help to resolve the issue.

One way to keep the drivers up to date is to go to device manager and click on the GPU and update its driver. You can also click on the monitor and update the drivers too.

Nvidia, AMD are the most common GPU manufacturers and they provide software that helps to detect the GPU and automatically install the latest drivers. You can do it manually by going to their site and type your GPU model and download the drivers. Hopefully, this will resolve the monitor ghosting and you can go to your GPU settings and check the graphics.

[su_note note_color=”#EAF0F9″ text_color=”#000000″] Continue Reading (What is GPU Scaling?) [/su_note]

If all else fails, then the issue is in your monitor, either your cable is faulty or the port is, if you have tried changing both then the issue resides in the monitor. As we mentioned earlier, LCDs are likely to have monitor ghosting while it rarely occurs in IPS. After trying these fixes, all that’s left is to change your screen.

Issues Similar To Monitor Ghosting

Most people misunderstand the issues and terms in monitor ghosting, sometimes it can be fixed easily and sometimes these issues would be due to permanent damage to the monitor. Here are some of the issues similar to monitor ghosting:

Image Retention

Faded images are shown and they stay that way always and once you turn off the monitor, they still stay for a short amount of time and they disappear.

Once you turn it back on, they have disappeared but it is likely to occur again and again cause of the damage done to the monitor. You can turn it off for some time to get rid of it but when you turn it on, a new faded image may occur again.

Burn-in Effect

This is a permanent issue and is similar to image retention but it is due to permanent damage and is most commonly found in old monitors. There is nothing you can do except change the monitor as it is a permanent issue and won’t fade away by turning it off, you can avoid it by not viewing a static image.

Motion Blur

Motion blur is highly mistaken as monitor ghosting but it isn’t just monitor ghosting but the overlapping of the sequence of images. It is both on the leading and trailing edges of the image while the monitor ghosting is just trailing of the edges. This most likely occurs in 60hz monitors and once you increase Hz, this problem fades away.

Conclusion:

In this article, we have given you complete information on what is ghosting on the monitor and how to fix it. It is not as scary as the name shows, but it really makes you feel bad as your eyes get stressed and you can’t see the images properly.

Screen ghosting can be annoying for graphic designers, gamers, or anyone who deals with graphics, editing, video editing, or any work that involves heavy graphics.

But learning the above-mentioned steps on how to fix screen ghosting can save your time and energy while keeping your screen away from ghosting.

So whenever you face screen ghosting, run a test to clear your doubts. Once you find it true, make an approach to fix the ghosting on-screen with easy and applicable steps. These steps are not very technical and can save anyone’s time by fixing the issue immediately.