On old TV sets, if you left 'em on pause for too long a time, you could damage your screen. On HD LCDs, can that same image burn into your screen if you leave it on for too long a time?
Wikipedia article. No citations, so the article writer may just be talking out of his ass.
On old tube-type phosphor TV’s, the image would “burn in” to the phosphor. It’s not just pause; videogames were the first to do this, since the earliest ones like Pong featured high-contrast bars that appeared in the same place all the time. This is why computers first sported screen savers. Most of the green-screen IBM terminals where I used to work had the logon screen logo burned deep into the phosphor. Even just 5 years ago, I used to use CNN as my video wallpaper because nothing else was on, and my rear-projection Sony TV burned that CNN logo into the phosphor on the lower left; you could easily see it anytime the picture was bright white.
Plasma TV’s used to have that problem, but claim they have overcome it. I remember visiting Downtown Disney, FL, about 2006; in some of the Disney stores they had large plasma screens playing DVD’s continuously; you could make out the DVD menu on the screen through the picture. If the DVD was left on the menu too long, it burned in; I guess they spent thousands on TV’s but didn’t have a continuous replay option on the DVD player.
Mind you, we’re talking about hours a day for months on end, the exact same picture in the exact same spot. The phosphor coating, the stuff that glows, gets burned or “tired” from overuse. IIRC, in a plasma TV, the plasma in a pixel excites the phosphor for that pixel - so same effect as the CRT tub in burning. LCD is a completely different process - liquid crystal in front blocks a light source when on, does not when off. The light then goes through a colour filter. Burn-in would happen if that colour filter faded from overuse; apparently that process is a lot less common and the filters are not as abused as phosphor, so don’t deteriorate as easily. LED means the back-light is a cooler, lower-powered LED rather than a flourescent light, but the process is the same.
LCD screens can also have an image persistence issue, as mentioned in that wiki article. That effect is not permanent, though, even though it looks similar to CRT burn in. One LCD PC monitor I had would have visible “ghosts” of the Windows taskbar icons if the taskbar was taken away for some reason, say to show something full screen. I noted that I could set the taskbar to auto-hide and they would fade away in a few hours. Then turn off auto-hide again because I hate that mode.
OLED displays, which are now showing up on some cell phones, have a version of this issue. The various colors burn out at different rates, which can leave an inverse image visible in certain conditions. There have been advances in the technology which hope to push he problem out past the useful life of the device. I haven’t seen one in practice to note if it works.
-D/a