Better For TV Health (preventing burn-in): Turn It Off or Leave On (non-logoed) Channel?

You do risk eventually reducing the emission from the blue crt gun compared to the red and green guns and having a poor picture as a result. Why not turn down the brightness so the blue gun is not wearing away the cathode coating material that gradually wears away with emissions.

I personally wouldn't worry about turning the TV off and on unless it is a lot more than 4 times a day. I would take my chances compared to the electric bill that the set runs up by being on all the time. I wouldn't turn it off for a 10 minute out of the room situation, but if it were not going to be watched for an hour, I would sure turn it off.

H. R.(Bob) Hofmann

Well, the brightness has never been left past 40% for more than five minutes. I dislike what high brightness and contrast do to a picture.

As for the blue screen; you'd think they'd come up with a blue screen

The blue screen has definitely left it's mark. It's imprint is apparent no matter what I watch. It remains still while the screen moves. It's subtle, but you can see it esp. when the color provides.

Thanks for responding.

TV's don't have the same issues as computers, because they typically have no plug-in cards. I think it's been tried, largely unsuccessfully, in the past.

Turn it off if you are not watching or listening to it for more than

Tom

The plug in cards don't have anything to do with it, the argument is mostly for mechanical components like hard drives and fans. I think it largely stems from the fact that a drive with marginal bearings or some other problem is most likely to fail to start up from cold a while before it fails while warm and running. Same with light bulbs that most often fail at turnon, but while people will argue both ways, I'm convinced that reasonable power cycles will have no effect on the life of a piece of equipment. Don't flip it rapidly off and on, but if you walk away for more than a few minutes shut it off.

Same goes for any computer, unless you are using several power saving features, in that case the treshold would be a few hours instead.

However, the bearings will wear out way faster when spinning continuously, same goes for electrolytic capacitors.

Well, reseating a card is one of the first things to try in many computer repair situations, and heat cycling could cause a problem, couldn't it? I know it isn't as likely as actually moving a PC...

Tom

mostly

fails

Yes, but when failure is imminent, it will most likely keep spinning until it's been shut off and then it will fail to spin up again, that's the sort of thing that leads people to believe that turning it off and on caused it to fail.