Screens · guide

Black pressure marks on laptop screen, and who pays for them

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 11 September 2026 · 16 min read

Black pressure marks on laptop screen have a name in the makers’ own paperwork, and the name carries a decision with it. Lenovo files the mark left by compression under damage caused by the customer, which is the part of the paperwork that says a repair will be charged for. Knowing that first changes what to do next.

Start with what this mark is, because the words in circulation blur it with something else. A pressure mark is not a dead pixel. A dead pixel is one addressable point that has stopped working, it is the size of a point, and its edges are sharp. A pressure mark is damage to the liquid crystal layer over an area, so it has the shape of whatever pressed on it — a corner, a key, a thumb — and its edges fade. That difference is the whole of this page, because the two faults are covered by two different documents and only one of the two has a published tolerance you can argue with.

What makes that list unusual is who wrote it and what for. It is not a troubleshooting page: it is the guide a manufacturer gives for deciding whether a fault is the machine’s doing or the owner’s, and Lenovo says so in its opening line — the guide exists because claims arrive for “products which have failed due to reasons not covered by the Lenovo Standard Limited Warranty”. When your mark matches a row in a list like that, you have learnt something that no repair blog can tell you: how the conversation is going to go.

1. Look at the edges before anything else. A pressure mark is soft-edged and shaped like whatever pressed on it; a dead pixel is a single sharp point that does not blur. The difference decides which rules apply to you, because pixel tolerances count points and say nothing about marks.
2. Put the screen through the maker’s own panel test. On a Dell that is holding D and pressing power; on a Lenovo it is Fn plus left Ctrl plus power. The reason to bother on this fault is what Dell’s extended version adds to the colour cycle: it asks you to look for “Pressure marks or spots” and for “Signs of cracks or spider-web patterns in the glass”. The test that the makers built recognises this mark as a category.
3. Photograph it, with the date. Not for sentiment: every conversation that follows — warranty, insurance, a quote, a sale — turns on whether the mark is spreading. Two photographs a month apart answer that; memory does not.
4. Check which document covers you, because there are two and they are not the same. A pixel policy counts bright and dark points against a published tolerance. A damage policy is about impact and pressure, and it is where this mark lands. Lenovo’s guide exists because “Lenovo receive claims under warranty for products which have failed due to reasons not covered by the Lenovo Standard Limited Warranty”, and Dell says the same thing in one line: “Physical damage to the screen typically is not covered under standard warranty”.
5. Then decide, rather than treat. Neither maker documents a way to remove a pressure mark, and this page is not going to invent one. What is left is a real decision: live with it, replace the panel, or replace the machine — and the answer depends on where the mark sits and what the laptop is worth, not on how bad it looks in the first week.

The panel test is worth running even though the mark is already visible, and the reason is that it separates two things that look alike on an ordinary screen full of windows. Dell’s basic test fills the screen with one colour at a time so that a fault has nowhere to hide, and its extended version — on laptops with a recent BIOS — adds the two things a colour cycle cannot judge: the cracks and the pressure marks. If the mark shows in the test, the damage is in the panel and nothing on the computer side will change it. The panel test, maker by maker has the key presses for each machine.

About the remedies. Search results for this fault are full of them — rub it with a cloth, warm it, press around the edge — and none of the four sources this page is built on documents any of them. Dell is the only one that mentions the technique at all, and it mentions it to say what it costs: “They can cause further damage to your display”, “They may void your warranty”. There is no honest way to write a procedure out of that. What this page can say instead is what a pressure mark does over time, and even there the right answer is a measurement rather than a promise: Lenovo distinguishes the compressed cell from the cracked one, and a crack is the entry that is described as having liquid crystal along it. If the mark is growing, the photographs will show it.

The last piece is the machine around the mark. A mark in a corner of a screen you look past is not the same problem as one in the middle, and a panel replacement on a five-year-old laptop competes with the price of a different laptop rather than with the price of the fault. Whether the machine can take the next version of Windows is a fair thing to check before spending anything on it, and if it can, the cheap things that make an old laptop usable again are a better use of the same money than a perfect screen.

Not covered here. It will not print a home remedy. Four sources were read for this page and not one of them documents a way to remove a pressure mark; the only one that mentions the technique mentions it to warn against it.

It will not quote a panel price. None of the four support pages read for this guide publishes one, and a figure from a site that sells the part is a price with an interest attached to it.

And it will not tell you the mark is harmless. Whether it stays put or spreads is the one thing that matters here, and it is something to measure on your own screen rather than to be reassured about. What holds instead is simple: the display entries of the customer-induced damage guide — the yellow spot described as pixel damage from compression, the black line, spot or patch and the white spot described as internal crystal liquid cell damage whose shape or location might vary, and the internal glass crack described as having liquid crystal inside the display panel along the crack — together with the statement that the guide exists because claims arrive for products which have failed due to reasons not covered by the Lenovo Standard Limited Warranty, and the description of Accidental Damage Protection as an optional service offering that covers accidental damage not covered under the Standard Lenovo Limited Warranty with a damaged or broken LCD among its examples, are quoted from Lenovo’s document HT104148; the items the extended panel test looks for, pressure marks or spots and signs of cracks or spider-web patterns in the glass, and the statement that physical damage to the screen typically is not covered under standard warranty, are quoted from Dell’s article 000134936; the warnings that the home remedies can cause further damage to the display and may void the warranty, and that applying pressure can crack the screen or damage internal components, are quoted from Dell’s article 000126004; and the statement that Dell offers Accidental Damage (Complete Care) as an optional service available at the time of purchase and that without it the owner is responsible for the full cost of repairs is quoted from Dell’s article 000123759.