SyncMaster 172S | Native Res = Blurry | Low Res = OK?

Just brought a cheap old 2nd hand Samsung SyncMaster 172S to see me through on my PC until I can get a decent monitor. It was sold as fully working with no problems but I'm not so sure so come here for some advice.

I've installed the latest drivers and set the resolution to the optimum/native 1280 x 1024 @ 60Hz and hit the Auto-Adjust button and some (but not all) colors/text seem a little bit blurry/fuzzy/off color. These abnormalities follow the image if moved on the screen so I've assumed it is more of a settings issue.

I've tried manually adjusting the monitor settings and they do seem to alter how the picture looks and it can look slightly better but I seem unable to completely eliminate the issue. Fiddling with the contrast option makes a small difference and so does the fine/coarse option. The fine/coarse has so many settings that this might be the way forward but surely the auto button is giving me the best of these anyway?

I decided to change the resolution to 800 x 600 just out of interest, hit the Auto-Adjust again and the colors all seemed to sort themselves out?! The only issue now is I'm not used to a low resolution and the picture just looks rough.

I have tried another monitor with no issue so rules out my video card.

Any suggestion/help much appreciated.

Carly

First try and reset your monitor to factory settings to get things back to a known good state, then try the auto adjust when you have it running at 1280x1024 @ 60Hz.

I have managed to sort it out now. The issue was the auto-adjust was putting it at a setting that was just completely wrong. I've never known a monitor to do this ever but after spending an hour mucking about with settings, I finally managed to cure the problem.

There is a setting saying fine/coarse which has thousands of options and, yes, I went through a fair amount of them and finally found a setting where everything looked like it should.

I'm really suprised the auto-adjust didn't work, I even tried it with various screen test patterns being displayed full screen and even this didn't help.

Any way - all sorted now - thanks for the reply.

Glad to hear you sorted it out and thanks for the update, it may help someone else in the same situation.