Yes, screen burn-in is a reality with Plasma televisions. Here is what you need to know to protect your investment.
What is burn-in?
If an image is left on a television screen for too long, that image can become permanently “burned in” to the screen. You will see it as a ghost image whenever you watch television, even if the program doesn’t have that image as part of its show. In some cases, it only take a few hours to cause burn-in.
What are some things that cause burn-in?
If you watch 4:3 video on a widescreen display, you’ll get black bars framing the image on either side. This is called the pill box effect. If you watch enough video this way, those black bars could become permanent.
Another big cause of burn-in are the tickers that are displayed at the bottom of the screen for channels such as CNN and ESPN. If you tend to watch those channels frequently, you might want to chose an LCD television instead of a plasma television.
What is being done to prevent burn-in?
Both television stations and programming providers, and the plasma television manufactures are doing things to prevent burn-in. For example, those annoying logos that often appear on television programming announcing the station or the show no longer stay on in one place. They will shift from one screen to the other and disappear during commercials. Tickers are getting a little better, too.
Many plasma televisions have features to combat burn-in, such as pixel shifting, pixel orbiting or pixel wobbling. Hardware providers, such as TiVO, DirectTV and the Dish Network provide the ability to turn those black bars on the screen to gray. This keeps pixels within the bar turned on and prevents burn-in. Settings for treating burn-in are also available on some models of plasma televisions.
What can you do if burn-in does occur? Stay tuned!
Mary Ann Romans writes about everything related to saving money in the Frugal Blog, technology in the Computing Blog, and creating a home in the Home Blog. You can read more of her articles by clicking here.
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