Death of Benq 22" display

Recently my Benq display died. It had already taken a fall and the screen was cracked in a few places. But it continued to work. Then about a year of work from home, it decided to die with picture moving up/down.

I got it repaired and it worked for another year or so. And now it's croaked for life. It's not completely dead. But 80% of screen shows alternate black lines and it's not usable anymore.

I bought it for about 7.5K INR. And it served for a few years as display for my lightly used Raspberry Pi. Then it was fully used for WFH since last 2.25 years. Now similar displays cost upwards of 10000 INR. That's inflation for you.

Anyway luckily I had a 22" Samsung TV lying around unused. And since the company desktop I have with me, does not have HDMI and the TV does not have VGA, I had ordered a VGA to HDMI convertor box for about 500 INR.

That purchase saved the day and I was able to use the Samsung TV as monitor.

There were few complications though. One was crappy resolutions. The max resolution I had access to was 1024x768. This happened because the display outputs to VGA and TV has HDMI input and the convertor box sits in between.

Anyway, last time the Benq monitor croaked, I used this setup for 3-4 days while I got it repaired. This time for 4-5 days instead of connecting the TV, I just used to RDP to the desktop from my personal laptop and use it. This was slow, but I did not want to shuffle the hardware in case Benq was repaired.

So the fix for this was quite straight-forward. I use Debian with X-server on the desktop. So I could use xrandr to add higher resolution and try.

First I tried with 1280x720. Result were okay - somewhat similar to 1024x768. The screen was fitting but pixel real estate was low. After opening 3-4 programs my taskbar was getting filled completely.

Then I checked out TV's specs and came to know that it's a FHD tv. So tried 1920x1080. But with this resolution, the display was shown cut from both sides and trying different picture fit settings in TV did not help.

Next I tried 1600x900 resolution. I think the convertor has some limitations, that's causing these issues. But I can't complain. So with 1600x900 resolution, I got success. It's decent pixel real estate. I can have 6-7 programs open and can recognize them easily on taskbar. I could add another panel and move the switcher there to get access to

~10 programs but it will eat into the available screen size.

Another few things I did was mess around picture modes and found "entertain" mode worked better than "standard". Also I decreased sharpness to 30 from 50 to get smoother fonts.

So I think with these settings, the TV will work as a decent monitor. Cheers!!