The monitor is just under a year old. The refresh rate i normally use is 85 Hz, everytime i go to change that or the colour depth on display properties from 16 bit to 32bit or vice versa the monitor suddenly flickers very quickly & switches itself off in an instant & when i switch it back on its ok, as i say it never used to happen at all before.
Without a doubt, you have a bad monitor. If it's less than a year old, it may still be under warranty.
Technical details (optional):
Modern
cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors use about
30,000V (30kV) to accelerate the electron beam to the screen. In order to prevent possibly-excessive X-ray emissions, the voltage is both regulated and limited -- if the high voltage exceeds a certain limit for more than a certain amount of time, the monitor shuts down for safety. When a monitor switches modes, the high-voltage supply may produce a brief "spike" of excess voltage. Since this pulse duration is shorter than the safety circuit time delay, no problem -- but if there is no time delay, or the voltage is already near the trip point, shutdown occurs. My current (older)
NEC shuts down this way sometimes.
On an older monitor, this type of problem is usually caused by dried-out electrolytic capacitors due to heat build-up -- dry caps lead to no filtering, hence no delay -- or component aging. Dry caps and bad solder joints seem to account for about
75% of failures over time (for some reason NEC and
Sony monitors seem to be more susceptible to dry caps than some others).