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Is CRT Burn-In Still a Problem?
coloth asks: "We've all been told for many years that monitor burn-in is a thing of the past, that CRTs use a different kind of phosphor now, and that screensavers are more toys than practical safeguards. After a few minutes with Google, nearly every PC advice site I found said as much. Well, I just realized tonight that I've got burn-in from the Seti@Home screensaver on my Dell P991. I took a picture with my digital camera. (disregard the bar of interference) I added the arrows with PhotoShop and enhanced the image a bit, but the burn in is clear. Here is the image of the "screensaver" to compare the pattern. Is my monitor sub-par? Is the conventional wisdom about burn-in untrue? Are most people doing anything specific to avoid burn-in?"
CRT burnin is virtually non-existent on modern color monitors as long as you don't have the exact same image on the screen forever. It was a significant problem in old monochrome monitors.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
Now I'm going to have to turn off my monitor all the time. Thanks for making me paranoid again!! (I never did trust screensavers. If your computer crashed you would have the nice screen saver image burned into your screen.. black is the only way!)
You must do something about that terrible black arrows on your monitor!
Every computer at my (ex)university had that same problem. Seti@Home (And, actually, all of the distributed-computing project 'screen savers') make extreamly POOR screen savers. If you're going to set it up like that, you should enable the "turn monitor off" option if your monitor is capable. (Saves electricity, too)
=Smidge=
Gateway VX900 (19") sitting on a KVM. Due to some funkyness "Invalid Scan Frequency" often shows up on the monitor when things go to sleep... After having left the monitor on for probably pushing a year or so, I can barely see Invalid Scan Frequency on the monitor when it is powered off.
I'm guestemating the monitor is no older 3 years, probably less than 2.
It's probably not nearly the problem it use to be, judging from some of the old junker VT100 displays we have sitting around with VERY prominant burn in on them. It looks like it's still something to wory about for monitors that show the same thing day in and day out for months on end.
Also keep in mind that your monitor sucks down a lot of power anyway - you'd save power just powering it down.
This sig no verb.
Apparently plasma screens are particularly suceptible to screen burn, and the so-called 'DOG' (Don't know what it stands for, it means the logo of the station/programme you're watching) often gets burnt in if you watch one channel frequently. The displays in the BBC TV newsrooms used to show this effect, but they've either been replaced or recalibrated.
I just wish they'd stop cluttering *my* screenspace.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
CRT burn in is not a problem during idle use if you don't use a friggin' "screen saver" that displays pretty graphics for long periods of time. turn on DPMS (display power management) so that your power hungry CRT is powered off after 20-30 minutes. problem solved.
looks like your monitor is hosed, go buy a flat panel.
I've seen the line "PowerMenu has shut off the screen to prevent burn in" (paraphrased) burned into each of the 25 text lines on a monitor. The program moved the text between lines to prevent burning in one line, and burned in 25 lines instead.
Please continue computing normally.
The SETI screensaver may be an extreme example, if you leave it running 24x7 without putting your monitor into powersaving mode. I tend to believe that burn-in is not the problem it once was. However, I think alot of the problem has been 'solved' by the gui. In old terminal based systems the same exact text always sat at the exact same spot. Now with Windows and other graphical interfaces only have a small area that is static and that is frequently covered by other windows and moved about the screen. Now you putting up SETI, without having the computer put the monitor in powersave mode definitely sounds like it would cause some burn in.
You can get pay a good $15 less on a used monitor at a used computer store when it has either "burn-in" or is "slightly dim."
Even our 36" Sony WEGA says it will burn-in when used with video games too much... and that's a CRT.
KRis
Kriston
Top two images most often burned into monitors: WinNT/Win2k "Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete for a secure login." and the BSOD. :-)
On the 6 year old 14" CTX cheap$#it monitor that I am typing a reply on a very clear burn-in of the windows task bar is burnt in. In the same manner check out the color CRTs on ATMs. At home I use power management and no comparable burn in seems to occur.
My desktop monitor has the outline of the /. main page burnt on it. o_O~
Yes, Virginia, phosphors do wear out over time. The problem used to be much, much worse.
... turn the darn monitor off for a power consumption of maybe 2 watts (off doesn't quite mean off). A friend and I went to ridiculous lengths during the California energy crisis to persuade his tech company IT dept. to tell everyone to turn off their 3,000 machines when not in use, or at least overnight, or AT LEAST over the weekends and holidays.
... they could upgrade the O/S ... but what they have works. There are cheap utilities that persuade NT to play along, but that would require getting the IT people to install it, and if they were unwilling to listen about turning monitors off, well.... you get it.
:)
I hate screensavers that run more than ten minutes -- they rarely seem clever any more, and more importantly they seduce a lot of people into thinking they are somehow saving energy. In fact, if the tube is fired up the box is consuming nearly full power and releasing nearly full heat.
MUCH better is any kind of sleep mode, which might reduce a 75-watt load to 5 watts. Or
They told workers to leave them on because of the old tale that electronics last longer that way. More research, I eventually reached a very friendly engineer with the Sony monitors operations. In short, the leave-'em-on philosophy made some sense before all solid-state surface-mount design prevailed because of thermal shock and "creep," which made IC's rise in their sockets. Now everything is soldered and the components are many times more reliable. In terms of monitor wear, it's probably a toss-up. No one would seriously leave their TV on 24 hours a day to save money, right? And even if wear were accelerated somehow with the machines on 1/3 as long, the amount of energy consumed would have bought a ton of hardware.
We calculated the excess electrical in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that's before factoring in the added load of the air conditioning to remove the waste heat (most of the energy used goes to waste heat). (A rough guess: the best estimate I could find suggested it takes 1 watt of A/C consumption to remove 3-4 watts of heat.) There was also a citizenship issue to energy conservation at the time, as there were rolling blackouts to ration energy the closer the system came to overload. (You all remember the stories.)
Um, anyway, I hope I made a point. Er, my point. One thing Apple did right was to support Energy Star early on. "By design," MS Windows NT 4.0, which his company uses, does not support power mgmt even though the newer monitors typically do. Yes
I think they did start telling employees to turn the monitors off just recently, maybe 18 months after our email campaign and a half-million in electricity. Could the computers be next? They're just dumb workstations and don't do anything in the off hours.
Last nail in the coffin: To give you a sense of his IT department, they sent a tech down once who could not be made to understand, by several engineers, the difference between a SCSI and a parallel port ("Well, it should fit."). No shit.
YHBT
AFAIK, the screensavers in xscreensaver don't burn anything in, because they keep things moving enough.
/etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0 I've added the lines:
But if we're going to gripe about pollution, Big Oil, and the like, we should be using DPMS. It's not tightly linked to APM or ACPI, or other power-saving features. It's right there in X.
For my example, in
"/usr/X11R6/bin/xset s noblank s 200 60"
"/usr/X11R6/bin/xset dpms 300 1800 2400"
The first line puts the good old X screensaver into action, and the second line handles DPMS. The three DPMS numbers are the times when progressive power savings kick in. By having these lines in the xdm configuration, you get the screensaving features even at the xdm or gdm login. (Gdm symlinks to Xsetup_0, I don't know about kdm.) By the time the third powersaving mode kicks in, your tube uses about as much current as a night light.
The flipside of burn-in is cathode poisoning. That happens, or happened, when the tube is blanked, but still active. I don't know if it's still a problem with modern tubes. But it takes so little to avoid, why not. That's why I kick the X screensaver in, and turn off blanking.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Maybe my screen's the one with problems, because all I see on your jpg are the arrows that you drew on it.
-Andrew
P.S. Be aware that photographing a CRT isn't too accurate unless you can manually adjust your exposure... Otherwise, you'll get the scanning emitter making it look weird - like yours.
They should put a button on the front of the monitor that would make the screen turn off. It would save electricity and prevent any screen burn in too!
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Running SETI without the screensaver app enabled, or even better, running it from the command line give you faster work units anyway.
:)
Since you worried less about your total units completed than about having a 'cool' screensaver, this is the price you pay.
Of course, you have the undesirable type of burn in. Here's an idea. Take that screenshot of SETI@HOME, reverse the colors, and make some lame VB app to make that the screensaver (be sure to adjust your monitor so that the screensaver lines up perfectly with the burn in). And, from here on out, don't use the GUI version of SETI@HOME...it's terribly inefficient. Use the console version instead.
Or, just sell the monitor to some lamer, claiming the burn in is from the next-generation Trinitron apeture grille in the monitor, for a jacked up price.
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You mean "bug", not "dog".
The case is clear. Their "screen saver" did just the opposite. You live in America don't you? :)
SETI@home has a built in option to blank the screen (without turning off the monitor or doing any fancy Energy Star stuff) after a certain amount of time. They even recommend this because the video code takes some time away from the CPU. There's no excuse for not using this.
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Now we can all breathe a little less pollution when you start having your computer shut down the monitor after 30 minutes of non-use.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
..I took a picture with my digital camera.
Yeah, I can just make out a breast, hmm, two.. hold on - there's four!
Ladies, form queue here -->
replace diving with dividing
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You know it's hopeless when NBC's White House correspondent has time to post on Slashdot...
I've seen an entire lab of computers with the Windows 2000 login box burned into the monitor of every single one. This may be something of an extreme case, since the displays were left on 24x7, even on nights and weekends and they were relatively cheap monitors to begin with, but burn-in is certainly still a reality.
The bottom line is that it probably doesn't matter if you leave the same thing up for a little while, but the screen should definitely be blanked/turned off the it isn't going to be used for any significant period of time - say, a half hour or more. Besides eliminating the problem of burn-in, simply turning the display off when it isn't in use will save a significant amount of energy.
Monitors should, before you power them down, show a white screen, and somehow scan it for imperfections. Then, if there's burn in, just blast it out with a HUGE electron gun jolt on the rest of the screen to balance things out.
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My company recently went over to big-brother-esque screen savers that rotate through the company mission statement. The funny thing is that they decided to put the company logo in the exact same spot on every slide, so it's now burned into my screen. Lovely.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
The exec. assistant in my office has a very clear outline of what would appear to be the standard NT login box on her 17" Sony tube. This monitor is maybe 3 years old.
I'd always been told from monitor vendors, engineers, everyone down the line that burn-in was a thing of the past, but don't believe the hype. It's not going to happen in minutes, my guess is that she probably went on vacation and left it or something. But then, that box jumps around, so I'm unsure what it really is. Perhaps she just left it logged in with a window there for a week.
But regardless, it's not impossible.
I like music
Let me get this straight.
Until recently you didn't believe in CRT burn-in, but you became a believer while looking for freaking space-men?
Your system of beliefs is totally fucked.
-Peter
I hope someone has mentioned that SETI (screensaver or not) also runs a lot faster when it's not wasting its time rendering graphics. I use SETI and have the screen go black after a couple of minutes so that I do at least glimpse it working properly.
While the burn in problem certainly has improved for CRTs during the last years, be aware that there are certain types of TFT panels which can develop a (partially reversible) memory-effect very similar to the burn-in problems known from CRTs.
I talked about this topic with a product manager from Samsung who told me that current panels are far less affected by this problem compared to the panles available one or two years before, but I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is even present in current products.
Specialist
No, "dog" is also correct - stands for "Digitally Originated Graphics". There are several campaigns running to try to persuade broadcasters to remove them for reasons such as burned TV screens and aesthetic damage to programmes and films infected with them. See here and here for more info.
It just takes a while longer to happen. On the order of 1 week to 1 month. I've seen _many_ modern colour monitors with screen burn. Do not leave static images on them.
The worst are computers with login screens that have no screen savers or screen blanking functions. These ALWAYS end up burned in at my work (in this case with the novell client) because people get lazy/forgetful about turning the screen off.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
I have my monitor set to screensaver in 15 minutes, standby in 45. Which for me is the best tradeoff in savings without my monitor shutting off too abrubtly if i get up for a little while. I use a dell/sony trinitron from 98 and it still works great (hell the dell pII 350 is still my main box, and you call 700mhz computers OLD). Leaving your monitor running all the time will only waste electricity, burn in the screen, and burn out the CRT. Then you end up with those monitors like you see at libraries and schools which have no brightness left at all and are barely readable.
Running Seti all the time really thrashes your hard drive. Considering how hot 7200rpm hard drives run nowadays, and the high failure rates, do you think it's really worth running Seti so much when it's probably going to increase your chances of having a harddrive failure perhaps 5fold?
I know projection TVs and CRTs are different animals, but the voices told me to share this story, so here it goes:
My Dopey Inlaws (who have never heard of Slashdot) bought an expensive rear projection TV and burned in the Fox News logo and "Live" in the upper left corner.
They left it on all day every day... to entertain their parrot.
Now, they did not think the parrot was a news junkie. That just happened to be where they usually left the channel set when they got up from watching TV.
I metamoderate, therefore I am
I work in a petrol station, where the terminals have all been upgraded. But before that we (the cashiers) had two terminals each. One which was the till, with an LCD for display, and another for taking the fuel transactions off the pumps. This used a conventional green-on-black CRT for display, which displayed 16 boxes (of the pumps) and their status by embossing them or highlighting, inverting etc. The time and date were at the top. The boxes got really nicely burnt out, unsurprising, considering this was a 24 hour station, open 364 days of the year.
Once I tried turning off one of the monitors to admire the screenburn. When I turned it back on I couldn't get the display timing to lock, and just saw a highly corrupted picture that cycled. The monitor wouldn't work again until it had been switched off for half an hour.
I don't know if turning it off affected its lifespan, but it was definitely buggered until it cooled.
On my monitor at work, I went away for a two week vacation and accidently left my monitor on and when I came back it had the "Windows 2000 Professional, this workstation has been locked.. press ctrl-alt-del to unlock, etc" screen burned into it. It's had it ever since, my co-workers were quite surprised to see a modern monitor with screen burn in. So yes, it can happen, but it'll take a few weeks.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
In Soviet Russia LCD monitors check users for burn in!
This is unsubstanciated and purely spectulation. Degauss every week. All those crazy shaking colors gotta clean up something. :)
Your immediately dropped into a console.
My immediately? I didn't know I had one, or even that anyone could possess an adverb. However, maybe the DMCA changed that.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
Either that, or whoever runs that lab is an idiot. BY DEFAULT, Windows NT/2000/XP load %systemroot%\system32\logon.scr after 15 minutes of inactivity on the logon screen.
The *only* way to disable this is to change the screen saver entry in the Registry under the user in HKEY_USERS/.Default.
Otherwise, the logon screen saver comes on (in NT it was the "press ctrl-alt-del to logon" box bouncing around the screen; in 2K and XP it is the OS logo that bounces around.
Which, penguinboy, makes me think that this is a very lame attempt to pin this on Windows, but your post is missing the characteristic "but Linux has a logon screen saver, that's why it's better and you should use Linux, and Bill Gates is teh suck," so your post does have *some* credibility.
But like I said, disabling the logon screen saver is not a cut-and-dry easy process (i.e., you have to be "in the know") so there.
No one has EVER told me that burn in "stopped being a problem" (I'm in europe). I've seen monitors that were bought early this year with noticeable burn in after about a year's (ab)use by clueless office drones.
Must be some propoganda campaign by monitor manufacturers in america, or something.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Back in 1999 at my last job, one of our clients had us order them a huge plasma display. They had nowhere to store it while waiting for the custom roadie case to be built that it was going to be riding in while it travelled to different trade shows around the country, so we hung on to it and, uh, "tested" it for them.
One day, a video crew came to shoot some tape of our execs for some promotional video or something they were putting together. We didn't have a really cool backdrop, so we were asked to set up the plasma display and just put a huge company logo on the screen, and the talking heads would have that behind them.
The shoot went almost all day. When they left, I went in to take apart what we rigged up for them. When I powered off the plasma display, I was startled to see that the company logo had burned in.
If memory serves, the burn-in faded a bit over time (with further use of the unit) and was no longer noticable-- this happened after the roadie case finally showed up, but the client changed their minds and tried to weasel out of the expense and stick us with a display we didn't need.
~Philly
only 104 units in 3930 hours?
;)
man, did you get *Delled*
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