# Vague Green Lines On Screen



## mfmcgreal (Jul 16, 2010)

Hi,

I suddenly noticed about 10mins ago a vague green, almost transparent, picture integrated into my iMac screen. The picture looks a like screenshot taken from when I was browsing within Chrome and Finder 10mins earlier or so to me noticing this issue... 

I had to take a photo of the issue via my iPhone as the green picture isn't appearing in screenshots taken on iMac, which possible hints its a hardware problem? 

_Note: The brightness/contrast has been altered in order for the issue to be clearly visible_







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The strangest thing is, it only appears with certain colours. For example, it appears in Premiere with the dark grey layout, it appears on my desktop which...in fact as I was writing this to check which colour my desktop is, it suddenly isn't appearing on my desktop now. In fact, it isn't appearing anywhere now, well this is strange...

The issue appears to have gone, as I was writing out this post...

Any suggestions as to what it could have been?


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## MartyF81 (Jan 23, 2013)

What you have there is called "Image Retention". It is comparable to what you might call "Burn-In" on old Arcade Video game screens, or older TV's and Monitors.

This happens when an area of the screen does not change for long periods of time and thus the image is "retained" for a short period after you move to another visual that eventually "Wakes up" the pixels and the retention fades away.

If this is a iMac that is still under warranty, you should bring it to an Apple store and have them run a Image Retention test on it. Depending on if it passes or fails this test... you may be eligible for a screen replacement.

If you are out of warranty, you could still ask them for help... but this becomes more prevalent as computer screens get older this is something that starts to happen with age. Especially with higher resolution screens with tighter pixels.


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