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The truth about Plasma screen burn-in and gas recharging

Plasma screen TVs have had some bad publicity thanks to the ignorance of some salespeople at national retail stores. This page is dedicated to giving you the true facts about plasma burn, so you can make your own choice about buying a plasma TV screen.

About plasma screen pixel burn-in and dead pixels?
A lot of people worry about pixel burn-in when researching Plasma screen TVs. Screen burn-in is when an image stays on the screen for a long period of time, and appears to get permanently burned into the screen itself. Screen burn-in can potentially happen, when running a computer presentation that has fixed blocks of solid color.

However, for most plasma owners, screen burn-in will never be an issue, and you are much more likely to upgrade your Plasma TV before anything goes wrong. To put your mind at rest, most newer plasma TVs have a feature called white flash·that provides correction if screen burn-in ever occurs. There is also a calibration tool called PixelProtector that makes sure your plasma TV is always set up to combat screen burn.

If you do have Plasma bun contact the manufacture for recommendation on fixing this problem

Very occasionally LCD and plasma TVs suffer from dead pixels when a pixel is either always on (lit up when the screen is black, for example), or the pixel is always off (black when it should have color or be white). A few dead pixels here and there are not noticeable, and manufacturers normally state that a small percentage of dead pixels are allowed.

The best way to avoid any problems with dead pixels is buy a plasma screen made by a reputable manufacturer (such as Sony, Panasonic, NEC and Sharp), as the build quality of the plasma panels is higher you are less likely to have problems, and if you do, the screens will have a guarantee/warrantee enabling you to get the problem repaired or the screen exchanged.

Do you have to "re-gas" Plasma TV screens?
This is one of the most common, and the most wrong myths about Plasma TVs. All plasma screens are completely, permanently sealed when manufactured. Each individual pixel in a plasma panel is sealed, and therefore cannot, and does not ever require any refilling, or recharging.

Next time some salesperson tells you about "re-filling" the gas in a plasma TV, ask them how long it takes to manually insert three different types of gas into every single pixel in the screen.

Someone told me that Plasma TVs don't have a very long life-span, is this true?
If you buy your Plasma screen from a quality brand you will get a TV with a rated lifetime of around 30,000 hours. What this means is if you watch TV for five hours, every single day it will last over 16 years. I'm guessing that you'll be looking to replace your plasma TV long before that happens, and on average most people buy a new home TV every eight years anyway! The lifetime of a plasma TV is measured by something called it's "half life" (this is the industry term for the period of time it takes for the display to appear half as bright as the day it was first used). All different types of TV screens, including LCD lose their brightness over time, but because it's so gradual, it's practically impossible to notice.

Blu-ray Disc Player
DMP-BD10

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data.

The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

The top 5 reasons to go 1080p

Why all the hoopla about 1080p? Most early adopters saw no improvement from their "up-converting" DVD players, even after going digital with HDMI™. Why? Because all they were really seeing was enhanced 480p on a 1080i display. The early hype about 1080p made us think it was the next big thing. Is it? New HDTVs that are "full HD 1080p" are shipping now so let's take a look at the top 5 reasons to go 1080p.
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