My parents bought a 50" phillips plasma around July last summer. In that time, it's receieved a pretty substantial amount of use on their part, and having not seen the thing for three months, I came back home to find some wear on the image.
The 4:3 image ratio is now dully burnt into the screen. If you see a widescreen image with a single light color, like say, a shot of the sky, it can actually be pretty dramatic.
So I'm going to ask a fairly hopeless question. Is there anything that can be done to reverse the effect, or at the very least, stagger its progress? We've had the damn thing for less than 12 months, and at this rate, the screen will be a single brown blur before year three.
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What was the problem exactly? How could I recognize it as such?
Definitely have them stretch the image so it covers the whole screen. Bring down all settings ala brightness, contrast etc to 50% and try that. At this point, over time it should go back to normal but you never know.
You should be able to find out fairly quickly by playing content that fills the whole screen and leaving it to run. MY guess would be that part of it is permanent and part of it is residual that will go away if you play wide screen content for a extended period of time.
this site essentially shills its own product, but it does explain why it occurs, and what you can do to address the issue once it has occurred: http://www.plasmasaver.com/burnin.html, one option is to buy their dvd which apparently has a negative image of the 4:3 screen so you can burn-in the sides to even out the wear on the phosphors. personally i'd just watch a lot of content that covers the whole screen rather than trying to use a pattern to even out the burn.
maybe you could go to the retailer and bitch, but burn-in is never covered. you might get lucky by being persistant.
What really concerns me is, given what you've seen already, how long is going to be before white is no longer white?