LCDs and screensavers

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
I'm interested in making a screensaver, mostly for my own personal use. I have an LCD monitor, and I'm wondering exactly what the risks/requirements of a screensaver would be.

I'm a big fan of 'go', the ancient Chinese strategy game (some links: 1, 2), and I simply want to make a screensaver that replays game records I have saved on disk (or maybe even get them from online).

The problem with this is that it would not offer a great deal of variation in the image, and I'm afraid this might lead to LCD burn-in (which does, in fact, exist).

Would it be enough to have the screen go totally black (or cycle different colors) for a few seconds every 10-20 minutes, or would that still promote burn-in? Could anyone with more knowledge of how LCDs function offer some advice?

(Maybe this ought to be in the programming section, but I think it applies here, too. Of course, mods can feel free to move it where appropriate.)
 
I think you are right to worry about it. The whole point of a screen-saver is to constantly vary the image displayed on every portion of the screen so that no one part will get burned in. You can't really know whether your users will run the screen saver on a plasma, LCD, projector or an early-eighties Sun monitor, so you just have to assume the worst. I know at least one person who has case-modded a PC into an old BBC microcomputer, so you really can't expect people to be using modern hardware.
 
I agree completely about not being able to assume what the user has. I'd be quite a hypocrite otherwise! This is mostly for my own use, though, so I'm only majorly concerned with LCDs (at least for now). If I ever decide to publicly release it....well, I'll do the best I can and put whatever warnings are applicable. I'm fairly certain that any visually-coherent method I take would be pretty bad for CRTs, but then again, all screensavers are pretty bad for CRTs.
 
A screensaver cannot hurt a display--be it CRT, LCD, plasma, or anything else. Screensavers are a holdover from the bygone era of monochrome CRTs. The primary use of screensavers today is security and entertainment. LCD displays cannot burn-in. This is also true of color CRTs to a lesser degree. I understand that plasma displays may burn-in, but these tend to burn-out before they burn-in. None of today's modern Energy Star-compliant displays will burn-in unless the energy-saver function is disabled.
 
Googling returns quite a few cases of LCD burn-in, like http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00D2ll and http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/fr_index.html?/main/lcd-screen-burn-3.html. And I've personally seen burn-in on color CRTs plenty of times, so I'm not sure what you mean by that. Are modern (past 5 years or so) CRTs more burn-proof?

When I say ALL screensavers are bad for CRTs, I mean that they will increase the "aging" process significantly compared to the main alternative: dimming the screen. I'm not sure if this is true of LCDs. I think LCDs age a lot more gracefully, although I haven't owned any LCDs long enough to really say. Any thoughts on this?

Does energy management help at all in the case of screensavers? I thought the whole point was that it would conserve energy by dimming the screen when not in use. If a screensaver is running, obviously it can't dim, so what would an Energy Star-compliant monitor do? I'm confused.
 
Yeah, I read them. To quote:
Hopefully if you ever encounter LCD burn-in, it will be reversible, but sometimes it is not.
...
Unfortunately, screen burn-in is back. It's just now called image persistence.

A euphemism really, let's call it what it is: LCD Screen Burn
Click to expand...

But this is really part of my question. CAN I count on it being reversible in any reasonable way? The sites I've read seem to suggest that I shouldn't.

Reversible or not, I'd like to make a screensaver that does not promote it, and I have no idea what steps I should take to this end. That's what I'm really concerned about.
 
MisterMe said:
LCD displays cannot burn-in.
Click to expand...

They most certainly can. In my office I can find at least two near-new LCD, three CRT and one DLP projector display all suffering from burn-in.

It may not be as bad as it was in the days when screens came in a choice of glorious green or outstanding orange, but it still happens.
 
symphonix said:
They most certainly can. In my office I can find at least two near-new LCD, three CRT and one DLP projector display all suffering from burn-in.

It may not be as bad as it was in the days when screens came in a choice of glorious green or outstanding orange, but it still happens.
Click to expand...
If you go back an reread my previous post, you will learn what is really going on with LCD displays. Burn-in is due to the etching of the interior of the CRT glass face by its electron beam. Needless to say, LCD displays and DLP projectors don't have electron beams.
 
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