Sudden death of entanglement is a well-known effect resulting from the finite volume of separable states. We study the case when the observer has a limited measurement capability and analyse the effective entanglement, i.e. entanglement minimized over the output data. We show that in the well defined system of two quantum dots monitored by single electron transistors, one may observe a sudden death of effective entanglement when real, physical entanglement is still alive. For certain

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... setups, this occurs even for initial states for which sudden death of physical entanglement is not possible at all. The principles of the analysis may be applied to other analogous scenarios, such as etimation of the parameters arising from quantum process tomography.