Thunderflies

[peanutfrenzy]

I'd never heard of this before so it might be a load of old hogwash, but here goes anyhoo.

I was perusing televisions in our local John Lewis and discussing the usual LCD vs plasma debate with a surprisingly helpful and knowledgeable salesman. As well as the more typical dead pixels / screen burn issues, he suggested that LCDs can be susceptible to thunderfly 'ingress' (or should that be 'invasion'), where the blighters crawl between the screen layers and die (as it seems is their nature). To add confusion to this bizarre phenomenon the staff in the Sony shop agreed that this can occur, but is a weakness of plasma panels, not LCD.

So, does anyone out there have any real knowledge or experience to add? Is this an actual problem, a fiction, or one of those teething problems that has since been fixed? And by that I mean really fixed, not the TV manufacturers' version of 'fixed' - which usually means 'better, but still broken'.

Cheers.

 

[Clare Newsome]

Oooh, this sounds like the X-Files!

(Or should that be X-Flies?)

I did hear some chatter a year or so back about LCD screens (TVs and PC monitors) attracting the little critters, but have never seen it in action. Will ask around...

 

[VoodooDoctor]

[quote user="Clare Newsome"]
Oooh, this sounds like the X-Files!

(Or should that be X-Flies?)

I did hear some chatter a year or so back about LCD screens (TVs and PC monitors) attracting the little critters, but have never seen it in action. Will ask around...

[/quote]

Then call me Fox Mulder.

This happened with my Benq computer monitor this year. One of those pesky flies crept underneath the protective screen and promptly died. It stayed in the bottom left corner of the screen for a good few months (despite much shaking of the screen - ahem!). Gravity eventually did its business and it is now no longer visible.

I seem to attract this sort of thing. I also had a fly crawl into the ventilation holes on the back of the monitor. I had a couple of weeks of the monitor buzzing at me and I couldn't work out why. I realised it must be an insect when I disconnected the power and it kept on buzzing. So I shook the monitor again to get that little blighter out. It worked that time, along with the Dyson. Monitor ain't buzzing no more!

 

[Andrew Everard]

This must rate as one of the strangest bits of salestalk I have ever heard...

 

[Anonymous]

VoodooDoctor

Slightly off subject, sorry to hi-jack, but may also be of interest to others. I notice that you are using a Buffalo Terastation 2Tb is your system. Is this purely for CD/ music copying/storage or are you using it for video content storage as this is something I have been considering? If so how do you interface with system?

 

[VoodooDoctor]

So far I have used it purely for Lossless WMA storage, which the Onkyo 905 can read over my home network (I use Netgear Powerline HD and Netgear switches). It works great.

Further to your question about video I have had a play this morning. The PS3 cannot read the video files but can read the directories (which is a bit rubbish). In order to play video you either need a PC running a Media server (such as TVersity or Twonkymedia - just downloaded and am going to try on my hard-wired desktop PC), which then streams the video over the network to the PS3, or a device which plugs directly into the TV.

I tried it on my wireless laptop using TVersity but couldn't get sound and it kept breaking up.

 

[Anonymous]

VoodooDoctor

Thanks for your reply. You would have thought with all the talk and articles about video, HD, recording, storage, streaming and computing convergence over the last few years, that things would now be user friendly. I had assumed that you may have been using the 2TB for HD/video storage and distribution.

 

[VoodooDoctor]

The plan is that I will do in the future. However, Christmas, New Year and ripping approximately 400 CD's to the drive have prevented me getting to that stage. I finished ripping the CD's a couple of days ago and your post prompted me to start with the video stuff. Will feed back more experiences if anyone is interested.

 

[Anonymous]

It's certainly not a myth.

Had the blighters crawl inside my Samsung LCD monitor a few years back - they lived for days and you could see black wiggly shadows moving around on lighter parts of the screen. Thought it was some sort of virus on the PC at first.

Weird.

 

[Andrew Everard]

[quote user="Hufmeister"]you could see black wiggly shadows moving around on lighter parts of the screen. Thought it was some sort of virus on the PC at first.[/quote]



Makes you sick, doesn't it...?

 

[VoodooDoctor]

[quote user="Andrew Everard"]
[quote user="Hufmeister"]you could see black wiggly shadows moving around on lighter parts of the screen. Thought it was some sort of virus on the PC at first.[/quote]



Makes you sick, doesn't it...?
[/quote]

Squits too. ;-)

 

[Dazmb]

Yep, I had them too behind the screen of my Viewsonic PC monitor a couple of summers ago. It's really weird seeing live things crawl behind the screen (and all over your desktop picture..) when you can't do anything about it.

I had to switch the monitor off as they were clearly flagging with all the heat. Unfortunately one of the little blighters died before he could escape back from whence he came! And they have the toughest shells on them, so they never rot away, and consequently blight your viewing pleasure for years to come.

Viewsonic (like Dell and most others) class this as a warranty failure and so gave me a new panel. Which was nice.