My iMac now has light colors displayed as white :( Anyone had the same problem?

I have a 20" iMac which has been working fine for over a year, this problem occured only recently. I checked out it’s NOT a calibration problem. No matter how I calibrate the screen, I can’t get light colors to appear as anything but white >:(

I realized this the other day when I had to work on my MacBook on a website I had designed with the iMac : I have a faded background from light blue to white and when I sliced the graphics I cut too soon the blue to white line, without seing it since on my screen it was white...

This is a big problem for me of course, anyone experienced it or heard about it ?

I don’t think it’s the same issue as the faded colors problem with the first iMac 20", as I said I had no issue before and this was the first thing I checked when I was delivered with my iMac.

Can LCD degrade over time (and we’re talking probably around 2500 hours of use so far) to the point where light colors get white ?
Or could it be a software problem (something happening with a graphic card driver update...) ?

The LCD shouldn’t degrade but the backlight might after that timeframe. Do you have a hardware calibrator like a Pantone Huey? Calibrating by eye is really hard to do if you want any semblance of accuracy. Almost impossible really.

When I ran my prepress business we spent insane (relatively so) amount of cash on great monitors with hardware calibrators. Some were in excess of $3000 per workstation for just the calibrated display. When the Sony Artisans came out they were an unbelievable value for the price, rivaling Barco monitors (which cost $5,000!).

Make sure you have millions of colors selected. Is the problem consistent across applications (is it only bad in photoshop for example)? If possible test with a second monitor to make sure it is a monitor issue and not a video card problem.

For around a year I have been using my macbook for development, recently I bought a 21" second monitor and everything looks different. Took some time to get used to it.

@ryan No I have not invested in a hardware calibrator, thought about it... still, no matter how I set the values (I have tried a lot of combinations) I don’t get the light colors anymore. Only if I stand with my head at the bottom of the screen at a very steep angle am I able to almost see them... not normal "black TFTs" have great contrast but less nuance already but this is really annoying. One solution would be to get a LED cinema display but cash is very tight right now, business has been down lately

@devcw Yes I have checked the color depth and it is million colors, I would have detected a drop in that area...

This post looks interesting: http://www.silvermac.com/2007/imac-colours-washed-out/

In particular where it quotes:

As being a technician I opened my iMac (which is very easy) and found out that the connector of the bottom fluorescent light had come loose. After putting it into place and assembling the whole thing, the display looks better than ever. I really love this computer

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1110321&tstart=0

Eh thanks for the pointer that could be it !!!

Now I might not want to do that myself not being a technician...