A friend retrieved a 2 yr old 26" Visio TV from a relative's rest home room. The aged relative is too ill to bother with a TV. The remote was missing, the TV was unplugged when we encountered it.

My friend was going to ship it back to her home state, but decided to test it first. We plugged it in and turned it on. Below is a photo of what the display looked like -- a huge artifact. The owner of the pack and mail shop told us that she felt sure that the TV had sustained some robust trauma -- even though there were no apparent cracks on the glass screen or anywhere else. She said she'd seen an iPhone display behave similarly and the artifact was there no matter what the phone display was showing. She expected that the artifact on the TV would persist in the same way, regardless of if we hooked it up to cable or antenna; it would persist and interfere with any tuned in image.

Can any forum member give me their thoughts on this? We did not have access to an antenna or cable TV hookup. I could (via buttons on side of TV) get various menu boxes, but the large artifact was always there, unchanging, throughout.

Thanks very much.