Is burn-in still a problem with modern plasma televisions?

Question

I'm looking at getting a 42" Hitachi Director's Series Plasma HDTV. I've heard conflicting things about burn-in. The salesman said not to worry, because newer TVs have "orbiters" that rotate the pixels so it's not a problem, but I've found plenty of things online talking about how you shouldn't play video games or use your computer with a plasma. What's the real deal? Am I going to be safe using things with very static images like PCs, TiVo menu, etc.?

Answer 1

Plasma designs have improved greatly with respect to burn-in, but the problem is not totally eliminated. You do not have to worry about ordinary program material, because nothing will stay stationary long enough to cause burn-in. There are two situaltions to be wary of:

Watching a lot of non-widescreen material on the widescreen TV, with black sidebars. There are two methods to avoid burn-in here: some sets allow you to select gray side-bars. This helps a lot, but there is still some small amount possible. Sets also have a "stretch" mode that takes the 4:3 picture and distorts it so that it fill the 16:9 area of the screen. This is done so that stretch in the center of the picture is less than at the edges, so distortion is less noticeable. If you can watch your non-HD programs and non-widescreen DVDs that way, it will eliminate the burn-in problem from this source.

Some video games have fixed images that stay on the screen a long lime. In addition, the images from games often are very high contrast and have sharply defined edges, both of which make burn-in more noticeable. I would not use plasma if you do a lot of video game playing on the set. You could have a similar problem with images from a PC if you leave the same image on the screen for a long time (hours); just make sure you have a screen-saver installed. Similarly, many devices (such as TiVo) that have menus will turn them off after a period of time to avoid burn-in.

Answer 2

Everything gp4rts said is correct. But furthermore...

Burn in is most likely to occur within the first 100 to 150 hours of viewing time. So during this time (and preferably throughout the first 300 hours) set the brightness between 50 and 70% brightness and your contrast to 50% or a little less. Trust me when I say that the first 150 hours will fly by and you might acutally like watching movies like this even more as it will show more definition anyway. Afterwards your plasma will be about 90% burn-in proof. However, I would never turn my brightness and contrast up all the way. It'll look real bright, yeah, but the picture will be washed out.

Definatley use the grey bars at least, better yet, stretch the image at least for the first 150 hours. Used like this, you'll be fine. I play my Xbox on my Panasonic plasma all the time and don't have any sign of burn in at all! I followed my advice.