Is smearing on an LCD monitor possibly a sign of having a splice on the monitor cable?

I'm travelling in China, staying at backpacker hostels and cheap hotels. Many cheap hotels don't have Wi-Fi but have a desktop computer in the room with Internet access.

The hotel I'm staying at now in an obscure city has severe blurring/smudging/smearing from left to right across the monitor. Similar to ghosting but one blurred image getting fainter to the right, rather than a secondary faded copy of the main image.

^{The photo is out of focus due to my cheap camera not being great at macro, but the smearing is still pretty evident.}

I've never seen this on a flat panel monitor before but it's pretty common on old-style CRT monitors with actual picture tubes (cathod ray tubes).

Since I'm in a cheap hotel and since it's in China, I'm wondering if this could be caused by having some kind of "splice" or "splitter" between the monitor and the computer. Because I remember trying one of those devices many years ago when I had a CRT monitor and got a similar streaking effect.

I don't want to move the computer and fiddle with the wires and I know the monitor is bolted or glued in place anyway and it's a tiny room. So I'm asking more about the general concept and don't actually care if some guy at the front desk is looking at what I type here.

So generally, if you see a picture that blurs on a flat panel display, is having a splice in the monitor cable one potential reason that could happen?

Or is that only possible with analog/CRT monitors and therefore more likely to be just a worn out display or some other unrelated issue? Possibly VGA vs some more modern cable?

Solution 1:

It's not a cable issue. Each individual pixel in an LCD is lit up separately, and with digital (unlike analog), smearing such as you describe is not cable related, so it's just a flaky monitor.