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Is CRT Burn-In Still a Problem?

Posted by Cliff on from the conventional-wisdom-vs-real-life-results dept.

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?"

1 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Burn In = Security by ZigMonty · · Score: 4, Interesting
    No it isn't and it hasn't been in years. All new world macs (iMacs and above) only have OpenFirmware in their ROMs. OpenFirmware may be a bit more sophisticated than a traditional PC BIOS but it certainly doesn't contain the GUI. OS 9 (which needs the Toolbox code in ROM) uses a trick: It loads a file called Mac OS ROM from the hard disk and uses it instead.

    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.