Chosen Solution
Hi, overnight my iMac has formed this weird display glitch and it’s hard to use now. Does anyone have any ideas on what it might be? I was thinking maybe a faulty video cable- or are we looking at a whole new display… It’s not graphics card because the ghosting didn’t show up in screenshots. Anyone have any thoughts, anything helps!
Update (11/04/2021) @nick @danj I think this is good news… The picture on the external VGA monitor looks great! No ghosting or anything, but same mess on the internal monitor, does this help us on finding what our next steps are?
( The external monitor looks like a ghost but it’s just bc the video is being streamed in 480 p so there are pixels) but here’s a better image of the ghosting on the iMac)
I hope this help you see the problem better.
From what I can quickly tell from the photo, it looks like a worn backlight (or inverter) or LCD. The problem now that all of these are over a decade old is even if the inverter is bad, the tube may not be far behind. Unlike when these were never it’s not as easy due to both being problematic and old since time is a brutal SOB. I would try and inverter and see, but if the issue persists the panel is bad, either due to a backlight or driver issue. If the driver is bad there’s nothing you can do but if it’s the backlight you can do an LED conversion if you know how to, or it’s time for a new computer. You just cannot find good panels at realistic prices for these as the cheap ones are usually near the end of their life. If the hours are low and has years of life left it won’t be cheap as those are hard to come by.
@brayunique - This is not a backlight issue and as you’ve plugged in an external display we can see the issue is not present on it. You clearly have a display panel level issue. On the backside of the panel is a small circuit board which paints the image based on what the GPU logic sends to it. This small board (T-CON) is part of the LCD panel as such you will need to replace the full assembly: 24” iMac (Alu) LCD panel,Apple P/N 661-4431 LG unit: LM240WU2 (SL)(B1) or (SL)(B2) or (SL)(B3) extension.
