I was doing some research on plasma televisions and I’m hearing a fair amount of talk about buring images in these screens. I’m also hearing a fair amount of talk that new plasmas don’t really have this issue anymore due to pixel shift.
I found one “review” of a fellow who said he left his spanky new plasma on a paused image overnight and ruined the screen forever.
This seems a bit hog-washy to me. Even old computer monitors needed days and days to burn an image into them. One would think a $2000 monitor would handle a paused television image for 12 hours without damage.
So what’s the real scoop?
Let’s talk an extreme case. Say I create a image with a black background and three large white dots. I crank the contrast and brightness. How long would this image have to sit on the screen before it burns?
How long would one need to pause a regular television image before it takes hold on the screen?
Well, my plasma was sort of burned. I watched TV in normal full-screen mode which meant 2 vertical lines on each side. My usage was about half TV, half movies. The color on the vertical bars was much sharper and brighter than in the center because of the less usage. That meant that there were 3 distinct ‘areas’ on my screen - it looked like there were 2 vertical lines. It wasn’t too obvious, but if you knew it was there, you could easily tell. This was after one year of moderate usage, from 2003-2004.
I have noticed that the newer plasmas, when in full screen mode, don’t use a solid black on the sides, but rather sort of a gray to darker gray with like vertical lighter color striping within. I thought it was just to make it easier to watch that way.
I think there was a recent study on this. IIRC it was possible to burn an image, but it took a while, and it was possible to “un burn” the image by normal use.
I seem to remember reading that a lot of plasma screens have a function that sets the screen to a perfect gray in order to “unburn” the screen. My research on plasma screens has turned up the same warnings though; that they burn rather easily. I think one of my brother’s video games warned against potential burn on plasma screens from a status bar at the top of the screen, but I could be misremembering that.
Well, by some home research I’ve learned YES it is easy to burn a bit of image into the screen and YES my new model has a setting to wipe it from the screen.
Granted this wasn’t an image that burned for hours on end - only about 15 minutes. But the wipe mode cleared it away in about the same amount of time.
On my model (2003), the vertical bars could be changed anywhere from white to black on an adjustable scale. I found the default grey annoying, so i switched it to black.
Once i noticed the burn-in, i started watching full-screen TV zoomed in to cover the whole screen (I will not watch chubby streched people), and this helped somewhat to lessen the verticle stripes after more usage.
As a side note, I noticed that nothing really ever happens on the top and bottom parts of TV shows. Plus, you get to get rid of that annoying network logo.
LCD has no image burn-in problems to consider. The fluorescent backlight of LCD TVs send light through its sub pixels which polarize and filter the light. Plasma displays do have burn-in problems. An issue which is problematic for plasma display technology. Burn-in is not so much of a problem when watching TV or movies because the images being displayed change often. However playing video games, displaying static information in displays or use as a computer monitor will cause burn-in for a plasma TV. In such situations, LCD is clearly the superior choice. Burn-in can be washed out somewhat by using gray images or a series of full colour images over many hours.
Just to make a clarification, there is no way “un-burn” or “erase” burn. If you have a tv that has a feature that claims to do that, all it is doing is burning the rest of the screen so that the result is an even wear pattern so that you dont have ‘burn borders’ like alanak pointed out.
This is because most cameramen and directors prefer to keep the action as close to the centre of the shot as possible (most of the time). But didn’t you find you lost any captions at the bottom of the screen? Also, when watching sport it’s sometimes useful to have the whole screen, e.g. when the cameraman can’t quite keep up and the ball is at the edge of the picture.