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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?"
Look, nothing's perfect.
:) It is safest to avoid unnecessary absolutes.
Some of the energy is turned into light by the phosphors, which then travels out a nearby window and off into space (energy lost from system).
Or maybe some of the monitor radiation gives the engineer a tan (chemical changes).
Or engineer takes data disk brimming with data home and loses it.
There, happy?
Even on old world machines (beige G3 etc) Mac OS X ignores the GUI code in the ROM as it is a completely different architecture (QuickDraw rather than Quartz) and it would be pretty impossible to use from a Unix environment anyway.
Logging in as >console drops you into a text console. No GUI. Is that so hard for you to believe? If you hold down command+v, Mac OS X will boot in verbose mode ie. it dumps pages of text to the console just like linux does. Command+s will boot you into single user mode, which is sh with nothing else running and / mounted as read only.
Here's a trick: install XFree86, login as >cosnole, run startx. No Apple GUI code in sight. Hell, if you had half a clue you'd know that Apple releases Darwin free without Quartz et al. The console is all you have unless you install XFree86.
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
As far as heat and monitors goes, here's the story, straight up from what I remember in EET:
Leaving a tube (not the monitor) on all the time, even if it is displaying a blank image will shorten its life because the heater in the back will eventually wear out (just like a light bulb). Again, just like a light bulb there is a thermal shock to the heater in the tube which can cause it to fail prematurely during power on, so there is a tradeoff (I have a thread where I discussed this. Only a physicist can tell you the numbers; sorry, I'm not one.) as to how long you leave it on before it is worth turning off. It is a very safe bet to say it is best left off overnight.
Now, we have the electronics. It's more than parts jumping out of their sockets due to thermal expansion and contraction. It's also poor solder joints cracking, and very poorly designed circuit board traces frying up from the turn on current surge, and crappy capacitors boiling.
Overall, you should leave the tube off when not in use, and the electronics on, since unlike the tube the electronics generally do not perform worse over time. ie: Use your power saving mode.
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