Display flashes to solid black intermittently

So bring it back to the store you bought it from as it's DOA. It can happen with any tech products it's just bad luck I guess.

Well add my name to the list of people having this problem. It's on my MacBook Pro 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo and the 24" LED display. The MacBook was new before Christmas and I got the display at Christmas. But the problem only started a few weeks ago. I don't seem to have a problem with the MB alone - just when it's connected to the display. I wiggled the display port connector a little and that helped for a while.. .not as frequent now... but still happens.

Curious... I don't see the option to change the settings in Energy Saver preferences for Higher Performance or anything. Am I missing something?

Well I have just gotten my monitor back after three weeks without it AGAIN. This time they picked it up as I said they had wasted enough of my time already. The kindly picked up and dropped off. Guess what... I still have exactly the same problem.

The letter that came with the repair told me that they had replaced the logic board AGAIN. This is despite the fact that the Apple care guy told me that the issue is with these 24 inch displays doing this blackout thing is with the cable and NOT the logic board. Are these guys even talking with each other? They have now replaced my logic board twice, at god knows what cost to them.

I caught a video of it this time using my iPhone (oh the irony), which you can see here. My brand new 15 inch MacBook pro plugged directly into my 24 inch Apple Cinema display - watch about ten seconds in. Its boring as ****, unless you have this issue:

http://www.mojogroup.com/AppleDisplay/Apple_24_DisplayBlackout.MOV

I pretty much give up now (it has blacked out twice more whilst I have been writing this post). Have no confidence in this product and can see why they have just mothballed them as the 27 inch displays come out. I am going to demand a refund. Being a complete sucker and hoping that the new 27 won't have these issues I will probably go for one of them.

This just started happening for me. I am on a quad-core Mac Pro with a Cinema Display (both about two years old). I upgraded to Snow Leopard about a week ago. This morning I noticed that when I was browsing in Safari, I would open a window and the new page would momentarily bounce around before rendering properly. A little later the screen went black. I thought perhaps I had moved the mouse to the "hot spot" in the corner which turns the screen saver on, but I jiggled the mouse and nothing happened. After about three seconds the screen came back on. A couple of times since then the screen has flashed to black for a second and then come back on.

I'm also knowing this issue since quite a while. Got my 13" MB (Unibody) late 2008, the 24" LED ACD some days later. Everything worked fine until i accidentally spilled some water near the setup. MB was closed, but water came in through the connectors. After coming down from the sudden near-heart-attack-situation while the MB seemed to die, i opened it, dried everything and it still worked perfectly.
By the way - it still does, i'm currently writing this post on it 🙂

Anyway - since this event, i had this short power-down events of the display from time to time. And i had the impression that it helps reseating the displayport connector. I thought i damaged the displayport connector on the MB during this accident with the spilled water, i think there even was something in the system.log telling me about some problems with the displayport.

The problem was soon forgotten, as it got extremely rare, in the last 1,5 years, i have seen not even a handful of flashes - until yesterday.

The ACD was used as usual, i'm drawing a bit more power from the display's USB ports (developing firmware, testing a new display, the backlight ***** about 75-100mA), but everything else is the same as always. I tried to do some work for about 10 minutes, the monitor flashed several times per minute. Tried disconnecting and reconnecting it - no success. I finally shut down the thing and did something else as it was too annoying.

This morning, i booted it, about 1.5h ago, played with my development board on USB, everything as yesterday, with a simple difference - not even a single flash yet.

I just scanned the system.log but can't see any messages for yesterday's problems. But i will have a closer look today if it flashes again.

I could imagine the problem is somewhere around the displayport transmitters in the MacBook, but i never had such a problem with a non-apple display connected via DVI adapter.
I don't hope yesterday's flashing was the revenge for the use of a BenQ display on the MB since several days 🙂

But as long as the display works, i have enough time to hunt all the other problems with my Apple gear that piled up the last weeks... They really should work on their quality control...

...Michael

Just got a bunch of flashes within 2 minutes. No entries in system.log, but a fan always spinned up after the flash. I think it was a fan in the LED ACD and listening closer resulted in the impression that the display completely powers down and up again during this flash.

I'm quite happy it's not CCFL. LEDs don't have such a problem with powering down and up all the time, but anyway, the rest of the electronics might not like this very much...

Just relocated my MacBook and pushed the displayport connector, now it stopped flashing.

I wonder if this is a pure electrical problem due to this Mini DisplayPort connector...

Hi, just wanted to add myself to this list.

Bought a refurbished 24" LCD a couple of days ago and began having the famous blackouts the next day.

So far these blackouts have only happened a couple of times a day, and for a few seconds. I've just switched to the "Better Performance" setting but, from what I've read on this post, it's only bound to get worse with time...

Not sure if I should return it now or wait and hope for a fix before the warranty runs out.

I would return it and get some other brand - it will safe you not only money but also a lot of frustration and time… if you take a look at this tread, you can see, that it was started early 2009 and had since then about 30.000! views, nobody here ever managed to get his or her very expensive display fixed and apple seems to care more than less about this issue, because nobody of their apple care staff ever heard anything about this issue - at least they always tell us so…

I wouldn't waste any second, if I would be in your position. I have 2 years of guarantee left and i am really concerned about that they are not going to fix this issue within this period.…

So I just bought the 24" LED cinema display, and a new MacBook Pro 2.66GHz, and I am waiting for the laptop to come in the mail. From reading this post I dont really have much faith in it (haha) but I will look into it a little bit more and see what's going on... I have the same diagnostics program they use in the Apple stores so maybe I can get something to show up on there, I'll let everyone know when it comes in the mail.

Same problem here. Bought an ACD 24 a week or so ago, and within the first hour of using it with one of my two iMac 27s it began the one-second blackout routine, sometimes several times in a few minutes -- oops, just did one as I was typing this; had not done one in an hour or so -- sometimes it will go for much of the day without one. I have another 24 on my iMac 27 at home and never had the problem (nor any problem using that monitor with my MPB 13, or my daughter's MBP 15). Have also tried this new errant ACD 24 with my MBP 13 -- same blackout problem. Never heard of the problem 'til i googled it and found this forum thread and one or two others. So this is the last thing I am going to use this monitor for (writing this post). When I hit the post button, am unplugging it, re-boxing it, and taking it back to the local Apple Store. Will just drag the decent Samsung 23" monitor out of retirement. What a shame that, after all this time, Apple has not event acknowledged the problem, let alone fixed it. And it just "blinked" at me again. That's it for this one! Disappointing to say the least.

Same issue here, brand new MacBook Pro and brand new Apple LED 24" Cinema Display, regardless of which graphics card is being used the monitor still exhibits this behaviour.

Has anyone else noticed that Apple has stopped selling the 24" model now? Coincidence? We had to drive to a local Apple shop to get the last in stock, wish we hadn't bothered now! Not sure what Apple are up to at the moment, what with the iPhone disaster and now this faulty product. They haven't done a recall of either. Not impressed.

I don't have the time to read all 23 pages of posts on this topic, but I thought I should record the fact that this problem is not limited to Apple displays.

I have a 27in iMac, several months old, running the latest OS10.6.4. Following a re-arrangement of our hardware, a Sony 17in screen became available, so I have acquired a minidisplayport to DVI adapter and plugged it in as a second display. All fine at first, but after an hour or two the flash to black problem surfaced.

I have another Sony 17in screen to hand, so I have now plugged that in. So far, no problem. My hunch is that the problem will surface again, but I'll let you know.

Message was edited by: Chris.Gill

From the first post: "*Still an unknown issue with Apple Tech Support*? After 2 calls to product specialists and apparently an undocumented issue by any customers contacting tech support this seems to be a widespread worldwide issue. In one form or another with no answer after several months of the computer release displays are blinking, flickering and flashing to name a few descriptions of this problem. Mine flashes solid black for a fraction of a second and comes right back on. I have had this issue in the power saving mode as well as the better performance mode so that kills that theory. To this point there has been no pattern that I have been able to detect. I can go for weeks without a blink and all of a sudden get 2 in 5 minutes. Usually I am pretty good at troubleshooting but this problem has no pattern and is so intermittent. BTW this problem is not at all heat related. It can happen during heavy use or very light use at low temps... etc etc"

Describes perfectly my issue. Has only become apparent after connecting a new external monitor (which is the one that flashes black for a fraction of a second, laptop display in fine). When I run Bootcamp/Windows XP this doesn't seem to be an issue so it points very strongly to a video driver issue (ATI RadeonX1600 in my case, of which there have been updates on the Windows side). I have updated to latest Snow Leopard and hoped that this would solve the issue but no luck. Anyone heard from Apple in regards to this issue?

24" Led display bought on september 9th 2010 just started behaving like this: http://vimeo.com/16628666

But only after it's been in use for a couple of hours and is 'warmed up'. It had the same issue while connected to my MacBook Pro 13" as to an iMac 21".

Problem now is that as soon as I take it to an Apple store the display cools down and doesn't display these symptoms anymore.

i'm noticing my 24" led display blinking to black occasionally with a macpro (4,1 [2009], osx 10.5.8) and the nvidia gt120.

i've been using the system less than a year, and i've started seeing the symptoms described here for about a month. it's not too frequent (yet). i use this machine for photoshop and after effects work, not anything that would stress the graphics card much at all, so i don't think it's related to the card.

the display seems to run hot, it always has, and i'm leaning towards this being a heat issue with the display.