I’d like to believe this is true, but One place I worked at recently had a large plasma flat-screen monitor (not LCD, I note), which is also supposed to be non-burn.
But the image on the screen --which had large statis elements in it – definitely had screen burn-in. You wouldn’t think, based on the mechanism, that LCD screens would burn in, but I’m a bit surprised the pl;asma screen did.
So, Are LCD screens truly immune to burn-in? Are most people turning them off now?
Plasmas are still subject to burn-in, although it may or may not be permanent. My ~2 year old Samsung 42" does burn in, but it goes away after the picture changes a while.
I’ve never seen any sign of LCDs burning in. Either way there’s no reason to leave them on and waste power these days.
Somebody should mention that turning a monitor off will prevent burn-in too. I stopped using screen savers when I realized that I was never around to watch them when they were working, so who cares. I always set my monitor to turn off when inactive, but I was doing that already when I had a CRT monitor.
LCD gets burn-in, too. I have a Dell LCD at home that can tell you all about it. I don’t know if it can become permanent, but it only takes half an hour or so on the same image to burn in. It goes away, but it still occurs.
Absolutely. We have one here at work that has some of the buttons from our circulation software pretty well permanently visible on the screen. I made a looping PowerPoint presentation based on what Stuck Pixel Fixer does, just to see if it might help, and when our network went down for a couple of days a few weeks ago, I got to run it for almost an hour nonstop. It did seem to help a bit, but I’m to sure that wasn’t wishful thinking.
I use screen savers on two of my PCs at home, both set to come on after 5 minutes of inactivity, then the monitors turn off after another 5. That’s because on either PC, I could very easily just be working on the other one for a few minutes.
Well, that confirms my fears that it can become permanent. And it’s worse on LCDs because it happens so quickly. Fortunately I don’t generally keep the same image on my home PC for extended periods of time – a few hours if I’m blogging, or working in Photoshop – but generally keeping it on a white screen or turning it off for a few minutes will fix it right up. At work I use many different programs and flip between them constantly, so I’m not worried about burn-in here. I also have a screen saver though.
I imagine LCD burn-in is a milder form of stuck pixels: The LCD elements collectively get twisted to a particular colour and, like muscles that have been flexed a certain way for too long, can’t untwist right away unless given imagery with enough contrast (i.e. white or black) to kick it in the arse.
All of our computers at work have screensavers with a locked down mandatory seven minute time delay of inactivity. It has nothing to do with saving energy. It has everything to do with some Homeland Security directive.
So LCD’s get burn in. So they’re lying to us to get us to save a little energy. Aren’t there a thousand other ways to tell us how to save a little energy without making up lies?
It’s probably not lying so much as simple ignorance. When I got my first LCD (which is actually the LCD I’m still using) I didn’t believe they could succumb to burn-in either. I was very surprised when I started seeing afterimages of static screen items and have since learned that yes, LCDs all over get burn-in just like CRTs. It happens quicker, but it’s usually reversible, unlike CRTs.
I can confirm that LCD monitors are subject to screen burn several times over. We’ve got some Dell monitors here at the hospital that are in bad shape. They’re on 24/7 monitoring equipment so they never go so screensaver. The static portions of the displays are really bad.
Technically it is not “burn in” for LCDs but “image persistence” (essentially the crystals start to retain some memory of their never changing position and don’t recover appropriately if they ever do change thus leaving that persistent image) but basically the same visual effect. It is a fair bit harder to screw-up and LCD this way than it is to mess up a CRT. You really need the same thing on and on a lot for a long time to get there.
Plasmas definitely burn in as I once scared the crap out of myself thinking my X-Box on the plasma would be awesome only to see a burned image on the screen after playing only and hour. Fortunately it was not permanent and watching normal TV “erased” that but was enough to keep the X-Box away form it ever after.
“usually reversible” is why the manufacturers insist on not calling it “burn in” but “image persistence”. I had an LCD that would get the windows task bar “persisting” on the bottom of the screen, should you happen to not be displaying it. As an experiment, sometimes I would change the taskbar settings to “autohide”, and the image WOULD fade away. But we aren’t talking an hour or two here - more like a week. I now have a newer LCD, and I haven’t noticed it doing this.
Color plasma displays anyway. Monochrome plasmas shouldn’t burn in.
The afterimage of the burn-in is actually caused by the plasma etching the phosphors in a color plasma display. Monochrome displays, assuming you’re using the standard neon/xenon/agron gas mixture (which glows a bright orange-ish when converted to a plasma), do not employ phosphors. When I made color plasma displays (and this is back in the late 80’s to mid 90’s), we used a different gas mixture which would “glow” in ultraviolet. It was this “glow” that excited the nearby phosphors (each specially formulated for a red, blue, or green pixel). And the phosphors could become etched by the plasma over time. The pixels could also become “smudged” as the phosphor dot tended to grow. And then there was "cross-talk,’ which occurred when addressing a single pixle would induce an adjacent pixel to also light. We spent thousands of hours and not a little DARPA/ARPA money trying to solve all of those problems - all of which have their root cause in the stability of the phosphor deposits. I’m sure the current plasma manufacturers have made great advancements solving these problems.
Tomato, tomahto. “Image persistence” is just early-stage burn-in. Manufacturers just like to spin it into something that seems less permanent, but it’s all cut from the same cloth.
I’m hoping my next LCD will be better. The Dell 2005FPW is really bad for image persistence. Any image left static on the screen with a significant amount of contrast between objects for as little as 20 minutes will persist noticeably, and it gets worse with time. Fortuntaely a minutes or so on a pure white or black screen will usually kick it back to normal, bu it can be irritating when I’m working in Photoshop and wonder if that little shadow was my doing or the monitor’s.
when I moved awhile ago, the computer was one of the last things to be moved in my car. i wrapped the LCD monitor in a blanket and put it in the trunk with some other stuff. I’m guessing that something in my trunk shifted and was applying pressure to a spot on the screen of the monitor and I have a small “dead area” in the upper left of center that appeared the first time i set it all back up.
It’s still there. It’s very similar in appearance to when you gently push on the monitor screen with your finger and you see that distorted, greyed out area, but this is permanent. It appears as a small grey smudge on the screen and is only visible against lighter background colors.
Any way to get rid of that other than replacing the monitor?