Display washed out until it warms up

Ok, so I’ll tell you all upfront that I know what caused this issue. It was me. I followed instructions online to buff the anti-reflective coating off my display and I did not do a good job. In the process, a whole bunch of water pooled at the edges of the glass. It could gotten inside. I also pressed down on the screen pretty hard while buffing. One or both of these things may have damaged the display.

Post-buffing, the display actually works with no glitching, and the backlight seems bright as ever. However, from a cold start, the image is very low-contrast, too bright, and green-cast. It also suffers from serious ghosting problems, with any bright white areas becoming temporarily burnt-in.

Over the next 30 minutes, if left on, the screen “warms up”. The contrast improves, the colors deepen, the green cast fades, and the ghosting issue goes away. It returns to looking 100% perfect! That is until the display sleeps or I close the lid or I shut it down for more than an hour. Then it’s back to low contrast ghosty green.

Check out this time lapse for a look at how the display looks while it warms up:

If anyone knows any technical details of what happened to the display, or how to fix it, I’d love to hear it. Replacing the display is cost prohibitive at $600, but I’m a big DIYer and I’ll try pretty much anything. This laptop is headed to the scrapheap so no suggestion is too risky or dumb, I want to hear it all! Because it returns to perfect function after being on for 30 minutes, I’m holding out hope for some kind of repair.

Things I have already tried:

• Sealed box with desiccant (no change after 1 day but maybe I didn’t try long enough)
• Baking laptop in an dehydrator set to 130ºF for 8 hours (no effect)
• Hair dryer (no effect, did not even speed up the natural clearing process)
• Leaving the laptop’s display on for a week (cloudy green returned 1 hour after)