How To Avoid Plasma Screen Burn

I have a friend who has a very expensive Plasma TV, but because he didn’t take steps to protect his screen he’s suffering from screen burn. It’s easy to suffer from screen burn; just watching your favourite TV channel for too long can result in the logo being permanently displayed.

Although modern plasmas don’t suffer from screen burn as much as older screens, it’s still prudent to be careful in the first 200 hours of viewing when the screen hasn’t been burnt in. Things you should be careful of is to not display static logos or images for too long (more than 30 mins). If your screen has a zoom mode then use it so that when you are watching standard programmes they fill up the whole wide-screen.

If you want to burn your screen in quicker, then you can follow this guide from hdtv:

1. Adjust the brightness and contrast correctly on your plasma TV. If you don’t have calibration material just set them to slightly below half of the maximum possible.
2. Display a pure white image covering the whole of the plasma screen. Reference Materials, Title 14 (System Evaluation), Chapter 6 (100% Flat Field) in Digital Video Essentials works well, just make sure you don’t display the pause button too.
3. Gradually increase the hours during the power-on/ power-off cycles (i.e. do this for 2 hours then switch the TV off for one hour; then 4 hours on, 2 hours off; then 5 hours on, 2 hours off; and so on and so forth). This way the phosphors can stabilise properly, and you can catch any potential problem before it becomes worse.
4. 50 to 100 hours of power-on running-in will age the phosphors sufficiently to minimise the risk of plasma screen burn.

This method works by burning the phosphors EVENLY by displaying the same intensity across the whole plasma screen, so that they get a good even workout.