Last night while checking my emails I noticed something strange with my LCD display. A faint line was drawn from where my desktop icons are, extending to somewhere in the middle of the screen. I tried to move the icon out of place, but the faint line remained in its place. Okay, so it wasn’t the icon. However, when I tried to move a window over it, I was in for a shock: the LCD had an image burned in it!
Thinking that I had to live the rest of my life with that burned-in image, I just shrugged and continued what I’m doing. Of course I was a bit sad that my LCD of just over 8 months had an impression of my browser toolbar imprinted on it. This morning, I tried to turn on the display again. The supposedly burned-in image was nowhere to be found! Curiosity got the better of me, and I tried to do a bit of research as to what actually happened.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing this characteristic of LCD displays. LCDs, for that matter, when turned on to a particular state for an extended period of time, tend to have some difficulty switching to another state. Thus the effect of some pixels being slightly off-color from some of its neighbors.
From what I’ve experienced it is not permanent, though my research tells me it’s not always the case. Left on long enough, image persistence can be permanent on LCD displays — though this should most likely happen to those used for advertisements.
So how do we prevent this? One site recommends the following (some functions are applicable in Windows, but these have equivalent functions on other OSes as well):
- Set the screen to turn off after a few minutes of screen idle time under the Power functions in Windows. Turning the monitor display off will prevent an image from being displayed on the screen for extended periods of time. Of course, this could be annoying to some people as the screen may go off more than they wish.
- Use a screen saver that either rotates, has moving graphic images or is blank. This also prevents an image for being displayed in screen for too long.
- Rotate any background images on the desktop. Background images are one of the most common causes for image persistence. By switching backgrounds every day or few days, it should reduce the change of persistence.
- Turn off the monitor when the system is not in use. This will prevent any problems where the screen saver or power function fails to turn off the screen and result in an image sitting on the screen for long times.
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