Thread
Local Power Mac G4 AGP Graphics!
I've tried the color return trick on mine. It seems I have one of the few it doesn't work on. :-/Almost all of my non-Apple monitors are Dell rebranded Trinitrons that I pick up from thrift stores around the area. Most of them I get have the same color problems where blacks appear green or sometimes purple. I've found that the "Color Return" feature of these monitors (I'm not sure if it's on other Trinitrons or not) works miracles.
If you open up the settings menu, go down to "Color" and choose "Color Return," most of the time, the color problems will go away automatically and a beautiful true color image is restored. You have to wait at least 30 minutes though for the monitor to warm-up before trying the color return, but the control panel will tell you when it's able to perform the color return.
Additionally, I've had good luck with creating ColorSync profiles that compensate as necessary for weird hues found in older monitors.
And finally, some of these monitors don't have built-in VGA cables. The Dell 21-incher I use as a second screen on my PowerBook is like that, and I just pulled a cheap VGA cable out of a box I had lying around of them. Bad choice. I thought the monitor was just old and getting fuzzy and blurry. When I rearranged my office, I swapped cables for a much thicker, nicer cable and all of the color and blur problems went away. The lesson here is cheap cables produce a cheap picture, so when you have a monitor with a removable cable, get a nice quality VGA cable to attach to it.
I also read about a cable and interface you can build and software you can download to change the settings of the monitor internally to compensate the way a Sony technician would, but that seems like too much trouble.
The tech software is expensive. There is only so much you can do in software, it is for fine tuning adjustments and will not fix dying electronics.