Plasma TV Image Burn
While the post-Boxing Day sales are behind us, we’re still receiving a lot of email from readers agonizing over which TV to buy. There’s also plenty of general questions concerningplasma vs. LCD, particularly those stemming from concerns over the issue of plasma burn-in. In a lot of cases, those concerns are stopping people from buying plasma.
Plasma, like tube TVs and older CRT rear-projection televisions, is a phosphor-based screen technology. Due to uneven wear on the phosphors, if you let a static image sit on your screen for too long, that image can end up leaving a ghost of itself behind–it appears burned in to the screen. The biggest potential for burn-in occurs when you have a high-contrast image — such as bright text set against a dark or black background — because some pixels are turned on to the max while others nearby are completely turned off.
CNET.com’s video guru, senior editor David Katzmaier, says the potential for burn-in is greatest during the first 100 or so hours of use, “during which time you should keep contrast low (less than 50 percent) and avoid showing static images or letterbox bars on the screen for hours at a time”. He personally has a three-year-old 50-inch plasma at home and notices that, after his wife watches the TV in the 4:3 mode (with black bars on either side of the image) for hours on end with no widescreen shows, he sometimes detects those after-images of the bars. But they quickly go away when he watches material that fills the whole screen (or he convinces her to use the grey bars).
“I just don’t worry about it,” he says. “Yeah, you can get some image retention once in a while if you look hard enough after hours of static images, but even then it’s temporary, not permanent.”
Thanks to some readers’ feedback, we have a few other tips to help remove burn-in if it occurs. Reader gmccnet got good results by recording bright static on a VCR and playing it for 24 hours to almost completely remove the after-image. Alternatively, you can set the TV to an untuned analog station for the same effect — just ensure the static covers the whole screen by using your Zoom control.
Tags: image, plasma, plasma image burn, television
Posted in General
2 Comments