I'd gotten bad/good news: My eyesight is following the normal course of aging...but what what an excuse to justify a new, bigger monitor!. Trolling the 'net one day, I found a deal on a refurbished 17" monitor at a price I couldn't resist. So, I bought one. It worked great. For a week.
Suddenly, the monitor's colors went wild. The entire yellow part of the spectrum would randomly switch off, distorting the colors toward the blue. I called the company I bought it from, and they shipped me a replacement that arrived the very next day (such great service deserves publicity: Second Source Engineering; check 'em out for reburbished equipment). The second one was "off color," too...but this one was stable. But, we were able to adjust it and it's now working just fine. We've already shipped the other monitor back.
When manufacturers and retail stores take back merchandise from a consumer, they can't resell it as new. The consumer may've found it defective, or might've just ended up having second thoughts about the cabinetry color. No matter why the merchandise gets returned: Good or bad, it ends up back at the manufacturer's warehouse. This now "used" equipment is either run through the factory repair program, and resold as "factory refurbished" or "factory reconditioned"...or the equipment is sold at a steep discount to a third-party who will do that work and resell the equipment at a profit.
Either way, you can get a great bargain on good equipment...if you're dealing with a reputable vendor. The carton may be rough, or the caseworks slightly scratched, but the equipment itself will usually work flawlessly. But, once in a while, a problem that caused the original consumer to return the product doesn't get caught in the refurb process (like our first monitor). So, you save a lot of dough, but it may cost you time or effort to replace the product under the shortened warranty. In the worst case, you just have to return the defective stuff (like the original consumer) and write off your experience with that brand.
Any technician will tell you: "I'd rather have a serious, catastrophic failure, than an intermittent, any day!" The intermittent problem of the first monitor's colors was too much for us to cope with, so we returned it. But the persistent problem of color shift in the second monitor was stable, and there are internal adjustments.
A quick call to a technician at Second Source (Thanks, Walt!) got a quick primer on removing the case, and where the internal controls could be located (largely unlabelled, as it happens). But, how do you adjust monitor colors to be consistent with the colors in the real world? A mistake here would mean I'd have to live with an "off color" monitor (I've made the odd off-color joke, but that passes; an off-color monitor is a thing of ugliness forever!).
Fortunately, there's software to help: Sonera Technologies' DisplayMate for Windows. And, for the occasional user, there are even some tests at their site on the Web. We had a Version 1 product from a couple of years ago (they're up to Version 1.2 as of this writing), and it worked just fine. We've got the image filling the entire screen, perfectly squared off and with pincushion distortion removed...and precisely balanced focus and colors. The monitor works great! And, I'm no longer squinting to read the day's raw material.
If you don't have the stomach for taking off the case, and carefully making adjustments in a space adjacent to 20,000 volts (for the CRT), don't even try this at home! But, if you're comfortable with taking the equipment apart and fixing the small stuff yourself, you can benefit from some of this "post consumer" recycling. In my case, I'd cut my eye-teeth repairing televisions in shop and homes during my teen-aged years (yes, they were vacuum-tube televisons in those days) it was an easy decision.