"I've never seen this before" - iMac 27 inch horizontal bands.

So I sent out my first yellow tinged iMac a week ago.
Replacement arrived today.
The SECOND I turned on the screen on the brand new machine today, I noticed a problem.


There is better color uniformity, and yellowing doesn't seem to be the issue except for this huge horizontal gray band across the bottom that is very prominent.

I talked to the Apple Senior engineer who had "never seen this issue before", and was surprised since I had one of the newest serial numbers he has seen (week 10 iMac i7)

Attached is the picture I sent to Apple which has earned me an advanced replacement (machine sent to me while I keep the defective one until I receive the new one - then have 10 days to return the old one or I get charged for 2)

(Ignore the vertical reflections, the horizontal bar where the dock lies is the issue at hand here)

Image is straight from my Canon with no retouching at all.

You're telling me a senior engineer says he has never seen the issue to this extent, and all of them have it?

My old iMac did not have this issue, it was yellow with two VERTICAL bands that were more visible at angled viewing.

But this is just plain as day. It's a dark shadow, and I don't want it to worsen over the years if it looks like this 1 minute out of the box.

My screen has been in use for around 4 hours in and out of sleep, and the line looks very prominent with no signs of fading, unfortunately. I will of course keep a close eye on this.

wessew said:

Kabir8, I have a calibrated display. I can see some blotchiness to your screen and the faint vertical banding but I cannot see the grey horizontal band. Your screen looks pretty good relative to the ones I have seen with yellowing and backlight intrusion on the Apple discussion boards.

Click to expand...

Calibrated display? What model?


My screen is MUCH better than my first. Yellowing is not noticeable, blotchiness, I can live with, but its definitely there.

However, the vertical bands that you may see are probably the door behind me and shadows from the walls. The horizontal line is plain as day, I'm surprised you don't see it, I sent it over to the Apple engineer and he definitely saw it and told me I shouldn't have to keep the machine.

I told him: "I Don't know what to do now, what would you do?" and he suggested I get another replacement.

View it full size, its one inch up from the bottom of the screen spanning the entire width of the monitor. Granted, with color I cannot notice it, but any light color, and it reveals itself.

The first machine was noticeably yellow and completely unacceptable.

This machine is not as yellow (though I notice it is still present) but this gray bar is too much. Watching a movie, I was able to see the gray bar affect the image on the screen without having to look that hard.

The shot I took was taken during the day, because I was dealing with Apple and wanted to show the guy what I was seeing.

I could take another shot in the dark, but the original image highlights the problem just fine, unless people are really desperate to see it.

Hearing that all the iMacs have this gray bar issue to some extent is funny, because looking back at the shots from my first machine, (I'm on my 2nd), I actually did notice a gray bar in the same position, though the yellow was much more distracting.

I can live with it for the time being, but a replacement is coming my way anyways, so I guess I'll be on my 3rd machine.
It sucks because I can't go ahead and load all my stuff on here like I did with the first machine.

If the new MBP comes out soon with i7, and my 3rd machine is problematic, I may just go with a MBP + ACD combo instead, but like a lot of us out there, I want to give the iMac a chance. This 27" screen provides the type of resolution I have always wanted (I was using 1280x1024 max for years)

The thing I am glad I heard from Apple: "We will keep sending you a machine until you get one you like."
Which wasn't even something I had to draw out of them, its great that Apple is doing that, I just don't want the norm to become 'send back your machine 5 times until you get one that performs as it should.'

Its easy to come out and say that all the iMacs have this issue, now that the issue is being talked about more frequently.

The fact that Apple finds this issue to be a "First" and that they are using my picture to show the rest of the engineers the problem that I guess has went unreported for a long time, shows that it is a defect, and not just part of what you get on the product.

What if the iPad came out and had a faint gray line in every single model manufactured? You think people would not notice, when reading text documents, ebooks, etc?

Maybe a tweak in manufacturing to prevent "yellow tinged screens" has in turn produced a higher frequency of "gray banded screens"?
Just a theory, but I have only had 2 machines so I can't make a definitive statement on that.

I am noticing that the severity of the gray band does vary, however it is far from discrete when I boot it up.