My heart goes out to  fellow reader Jonathan Beard about his dead pixels - this sort of happened to me  recently.

Having spent nearly  £2,000 on a top end laptop, I was dismayed when, only a few days after purchase,  a pixel jammed on - a white dot near the bottom of my screen, just below where a  wide-screen DVD plays. It made using the laptop for anything other than plain old text entry useless. You really can't look away from it once it starts. Watching DVDs or trying to do graphical work on it was rendered  unpleasurable.

To the credit of the vendor, they did offer to change it, and sell it in their 'used' channel,  but the sting in the tail was that I had to accept the condition that I was only  allowed one such change. As they told me, there was no guarantee that the next  one wouldn't have more defective pixels. They told me that this was a very common defect - that 1 in 10 monitors would have such a pixel in the first  year.

That is what the  industry tells us. In fact, apart from my recent experience, I have never seen  anyone with a laptop that had a dead pixel. If the seller was correct about 1 in 10 having a dead pixel, then why do their showrooms have only monitors that are perfect? Surely they should allow for 1 in 10 of their monitors to have a  defective pixel, just to show customers what they should expect? Talking to  friends and clients, I have mentioned this problem, and no-one had ever heard of  a defective pixel, let alone seen a screen that had one.

The reality is that  there are very few defective pixels - some, I agree, but very few. Imagine that  you were buying an expensive dinner service from Royal Doulton, and you noticed  a splodge on one of the plates. How would you react if Royal Doulton responded  by saying, "Well, it is difficult to manufacture these things to such high  tolerances, so you as the customer must take the risk that you get a duff  product". I suspect that your reply would be, "I am not paying first-hand prices  for defective products, if you put it in the reject channel and charged a fair  price for it, then I wouldn't mind."

The industry  responds by relying on ISO 13406-2: when was this published, and on what  research was it  based? As far as I can tell, it hasn't been updated since  it was published in 2000, which means that it was based on manufacturing data in  the late 90's. Hardly relevant as a criterion for modern manufacturing. It  wouldn't matter if the standard had been updated, the question is who should  bear the risk of there being a defect - the consumer, or the  manufacturer.

My own view is that  the manufacturer should bear the risk, and seek to sell the defective monitor in  a rejects channel. There are many applications where precision is not required -  such as where a monitor is used by an IT department to get access to a server.  However, where a user gets a monitor and wants to use it for graphics, watching  films, why should we pay a first-hand price for a product that is - by any  ordinary standards - defective?

I feel strongly  about this - there is one word for what the industry is doing, it is a rip-off.  A certain percentage of cars are delivered with defects - does this mean that  the consumer should accept them? Would you accept a car that was delivered with  scratches on the paintwork? Would you apply the same argument to food - calmly  accepting that some food is - in percentage terms - dirty or infected with  salmonella, and would you agree that the consumer should just accept the  risk?

Come on, this  industry practice is a rip-off, and it should be accepted as such. You wouldn't  apply these sorts of arguments anywhere else.

R Stephens