My iPad screen is half black the lower side and progressing

Does it stay in the same place whichever way up you are holding the iPad ?

You could try a reset : press and hold both the sleep and home buttons for about 10 to 15 seconds (ignore the red slider), after which the Apple logo should appear - you won't lose any content, it's the iPad equivalent of a reboot. If that doesn't work then you could try restoring to your last backup and/or resetting back to factory defaults. But it may well be a hardware issue so you may need to contact Apple

Me too. It is a band of black and colored lines running vertical in landscape and horizontal in portrait about two inches wide. It's cover over all apps and all the time. Reboot, restore is no help but touch function works fine across the stripes. The screen capture from the iPad1 does not appear the band of black and colored lines. It shows a normal screen. The answer when asked at the Genius Bar is, they never seen this problem before. And the solution that fix the problem may be expensive. But when searching on Google with the keyword "iPad half screen black" it's return 64,800,000 results. Some user comment that the video display hardware on the system board has been damaged. It's possible something has been dislodged or come loose. But, again, why this happened to many many users in the same period? In most cases the iPad never drop. It's happened immediately with no sign of warning. There are no ways to fix it right now. The iPad1 is just 2 years released. Is it too early to replace with the iPad3?

The same thing happened to me. I had to replace it. I suggest backing up everything as fast as you can, the other half of my screen starting going crazy (getting really light, getting really dark, inverting, etc.).

Best wishes.