Slashdot Mirror
Do Later LCDs Need Screen Savers?
bwdunn asks: "Do we need to run screen savers again to prevent the burn-in we saw on the very old CRTs? Dell's latest and greatest laptops, the Latitude D800 and Inspiron 8500 both suffer from horrible screen burn-in problems with burn-in visible after as little as 2 hours. Dell claims this is an industry wide problem. The high end displays from Apple also seem to have this problem. I have never seen this problem before 2002. Is this something new due to inferior LCD screen manufacturing compared to screens from just a few years ago?"
The local department has recently been replacing the CRT displays in the computing labs with LCDs as part of their rolling upgrade cycle. So that it's easier to distinguish between a working PC and a dead one by whether or not the login screen is showing, we turned off the screensaver -- thinking that ``there's no phosphor to get burned in.''.
Doesn't appear to be true, sadly. A number of displays are now starting to get a burnt-in image of the login window.
Time to update the login manager scripts with a small call to xscreensaver, methinks..
The answer (at least for Dell) is in the forums that were linked to in the summary. Send it back. Get a new one. If the new one also burns in, do it again. Do it until you get an LCD that doesn't burn in. It's a major hassle, but it appears that all of their LCDs don't suffer from this problem, thus it's unlikely that "new" LCDs have this problem. Looks like a bad batch or poor construction somewhere in the laptop/LCD, since replacing the LCD will eventually get rid of the problem.
Here. Picture after 15 hours of burn-in and 51 hours of uninterupted reconditioning.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Iâ(TM)ve had five Dell C810 Latitude laptop screens (over three machines) that all exhibited this ghosting problem. Kits from work, so they were under warranty. No problems with any of the thinkpads or the Dell Precision M50 (?), so Iâ(TM)m willing to bet Dell cut some corners on the Latitude series.
Industry problem my assâ¦
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Well, I was going to post a reply to the effect of "aren't those fluorescent, so they waste energy turning them off and on," but it turns out I was wrong about that and this site has a very good explanation of why that used to be true but isn't any more.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Actually it can be done either way. A liquid crystal, when powered, rotates the polarization of light 90 degrees. When unpowered it has no effect. So, a LCD display is made from two polarizers and a layer of liquid crystals. Consider this:
Whether white or black is powered depends on the way the display is made.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
I don't have a problem with burn-in- but I use the screen saver- more important is to shut off your backlight- they have a limited lifetime, and will lose intensity over time.
They already are...again.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Isn't After Dark supposed to be released for OS X any day now?
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
One of the big drawbacks of LCD's is that the backlight has a fairly limited life. Usually 3-6 thousand hours. You shouldn't be using a screen saver, since the backlight is still on. You should use something that just shuts your screen off after X minutes.
:). I never used them. I just used a screen blanker, even with the old CRT's.
I never did understand screensavers...sure they keep burn in down, but your still displaying something on your screen, which does cause some burn in (just let it show the screen saver for 20 years!