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Powerbook Pink Screen

Dronecatcher

Dronecatcher

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 17, 2014
5,278
7,937
Lincolnshire, UK
Sigh...my much anticipated 1Ghz Titanium arrived with a headache...when it boots the screen is a blushing pink.

Within a minute it fades back to the normal healthy colour - I haven't tried starting with an external monitor yet but is this normally a LCD or GPU issue?

pink.jpg
 
LCD. I've had a Pismo and a Clamshell that did the same. Replacing the screens fixed both.

clampink.jpg


Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck finding a replacement screen assembly for my 867 mhz TiBook (the assembly is damaged although the screen works fine); at least at a decent price. Most sellers on eBay want more than the cost of buying a whole machine, and I don't trust that dead machines won't have pressure damage.
 
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Dronecatcher said:
Thanks. Does it get progressively worse do you know? Is it thermal related - when I turned it on after delivery the screen was blood red but now at room temp only pink?
Click to expand...

Not sure. I never let it go long enough to see if it did get worse. I would assume, based on usage, that it will probably get worse.

pl1984 said:
It appears the green gun in the screen is going out :D
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If only. That would only require replacing the transistor, fixing a cold solder joint, or breaking out the tube rejuvenator. Ahh... the good old days of fixing arcade game CRTs... :)
 
Dronecatcher said:
Sigh...my much anticipated 1Ghz Titanium arrived with a headache...when it boots the screen is a blushing pink.

Within a minute it fades back to the normal healthy colour - I haven't tried starting with an external monitor yet but is this normally a LCD or GPU issue?

View attachment 735936
Click to expand...

Oh, that's disappointing bad luck!
I purchased a G3 Pismo a short while back as a spares unit; seemed a good deal as it was in it's original box with all documentation. It was being sold 'as is', and on arrival I found the screen similar to the one you describe - perhaps a liitle less pink, but a certain colourful panther - dum-dum-da-dum - would certainly have got lost in the background ;). The blushing pink diminishes in density after 3-4 min, and screen becomes fairly useable.
I've retained it as a spares source (less the screen of course).
 
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Sorry for that.
It's the back-light slow death. But it can be really slow, and still be useable for long. Have a Pismo like that since years, the time for the screen to get normal takes just the time for boot to finish.
Never noticed changes, but i suppose some day the back-light will completely fail.
 
I have such a beast as well. Starts off with a pink cast but after a few minutes the discolouring goes. I just regard it as part of the boot sequence.

There are worse things. I have a PowerBook Duo that suffers from creeping tunnel vision. After 10-15 minutes it looks like someone has applied a vignette filter to the desktop. Poor quality screens are the cause, it seems.
 
@Dronecatcher it sounds like the other guys have pinpointed the failure here, but is it worth trying to reseat the display cable on the logic board as a 1st port of repair?

You never now, sometimes a wiggle or a reseat fixes issues with these old Macs. Like my PB17" refusing to boot until I shuffled the RAM around 3 times and then held my tongue to the left side before hitting the power button.
 
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Dronecatcher said:
Sigh...my much anticipated 1Ghz Titanium arrived with a headache...when it boots the screen is a blushing pink.
Within a minute it fades back to the normal healthy colour - I haven't tried starting with an external monitor yet but is this normally a LCD or GPU issue?
View attachment 735936
Click to expand...

Oh, sorry for that - but happily you've got that other 3£ TiBook to swap screens.
My TiBook is also a Frankenbook made of two devices. The resulting 1GHz one looked inside as if dust and muck caused a fire close to heatsinks and fans... After some spring-clean it still works fine and I enjoy the real estate of the bright 15" screen and os9 (mainly for the purpose of discovering the game-gems from MacintoshGarden).
The design is really funny - painted plastic frame with that tin-toy like Titanium-sheets ... (shame on me, having said that. :x )
 
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My 667 Ti is pink when it wakes up the screen too. Old bulbs with lots of hours on them, but it hasn't gotten any worse in the 8 or so years I've had the machine.
 
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Yeah, it's noticeable when you compare to a modern LED backlit screen that the CCFLs take a while to warm up even on a good screen.

As said above, the backlight is dying. They tend to go pink or orange when they've got lots of hours on them. New screen time.
 
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Think I might leave as is unless it's get unbearable - it settles down after a minute anyway. On the plus side, as the seller sold it as fully functional, they've given me a full, no quibble refund - which is rare on ebay nowadays.
 
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Time to dish out some Light bulb knowledge :)

the pink colour is caused because the CCFL tubes in the LCD screen are whats called mercury starved, basically the very small amount of mercury contained in them has been absorbed into the components of the lamp (components like the phosphor and or electrodes) starving the main discharge of mercury and causing only the Argon/krypton/neon buffer gas to be ionised and when combined with the phosphor you get the pink hue you see

its quite common to see it on fluorescent tubes too especially modern ones which have not as much mercury as older ones, (in the US, Philips Alto Tubes are especially known for going mercury starved)

one of the things we lighting collectors do to "fix" tubes that have gone mercury starved like this is to bake/heat the tube, usually in an oven to drive the mercury back out from the components of the tube. but in the case of a LCD it would require a complete teardown of the LCD to get to the CCFL tubes and some times the fix is only temporary...

its also worth just letting the screen run at full brightness for a while

tubes which have not been used in many years can go mercury starved temporally that will clear up once ran for a while
 
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I have a somewhat similiar issue as well. Upon booting my iBook g4, the screen looks... dim towards the bottom of the screen, while the rest looks healthy, this uneven lighting goes away after about 10 minutes, however it unsettles me. What is the cause of this?
 
TC_GoldRush said:
I have a somewhat similiar issue as well. Upon booting my iBook g4, the screen looks... dim towards the bottom of the screen, while the rest looks healthy, this uneven lighting goes away after about 10 minutes, however it unsettles me. What is the cause of this?
Click to expand...
That would be your backlight starting to fail.
 
Sounds like a backlighting issue. Before LED backlighting became a thing, CCFL tubes were used for backlighting and those have a finite lifetime.
 
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TC_GoldRush said:
I have a somewhat similiar issue as well. Upon booting my iBook g4, the screen looks... dim towards the bottom of the screen, while the rest looks healthy, this uneven lighting goes away after about 10 minutes, however it unsettles me. What is the cause of this?
Click to expand...

the issues you described are caused by the same issues that cause some LCD screens to go dim and pink, you can see my explanation for why they go dim and pink in one of the posts above :)

MagicBoy said:
@LightBulbFun Will be here shortly with long winded explanations about mercury and whatnot... ;)
Click to expand...

you could always just google it :D
 
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I may have a faulty (as in cracked) lcd available at some point if it's possible to swap the backlights as this one doesn't go pink, I need to get it out of my a1001 tibook first but I'd be willing to let it go for the cost of postage (UK) as I'd likely throw it away otherwise. Probably wouldn't be until some time in the new year though.
 
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