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?"

Comments

It's better that way

[quintessent]

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.

Definitely Yes

[penguinboy]

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.

Damned company logo.

[dmorin]

I think popular thought on burn in was that rotating screen savers made the problem go away because the pattern never stayed in one place. This is why ATM's usually suffer from the problem, because they show the same screen all day long.

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.