Nathan's blog

UPDATE 03/27/2008: Sorry, I'm not doing any break-in today. I might need to again in about a week, as I might have to get this panel replaced.

I recently purchased a new plasma TV - the Panasonic TH-50PZ85U. Plasmas are known to have some potential for image retention and burn-in. Image retention occurs when you leave a static image on the screen for a period of time, and you can still see it after changing the image. This is completely temporary and quite common. It's nothing to be concerned about. Burn-in is PERMANENT image retention. If a static image is left on the screen for too long, it can remain there permanently. We certainly don't want this. These issues were more of a concern with earlier generations of plasma displays. Progress has been made with more recent displays to make this less of an issue. Many report being able to use the display as they want without having any problems as long as they don't abuse the display by leaving things on the screen for extended periods of time.

It is known that plasmas are more prone to these issues early in their life. Because of this, some recommend a break-in period during at least the first 100 hours during which low contrast and brightness settings are used and letterboxed/pillarboxed material and static images(including gaming) are avoided. Panasonic even recommends this.

As it can take a while to get through these 100 hours with normal and careful TV viewing, one person made a DVD to speed up the process. This DVD can be found here. Usage is discussed in detail at AVS Forum. It's simply a slide show of solid color, full-screen images.

I've been using this on my new plasma, and I want to run it while I'm away at work tomorrow. However, there's always a chance something could go wrong with the DVD player or with the power and end up leaving a menu or other static image on the screen. This would obviously be terrible. Because of this, I thought I'd use my webcam to keep an eye on things. Below is the live stream of my TV playing the break-in DVD. Of course, chances are slim that when you read this the stream will still be live because I'll only turn it on when I need it. It's just an easy place for me to keep an eye on it when I need to.

If you've been shopping for an HDTV, you've no doubt seen the 1080p spec tossed around. This stands for a progressive scan display at a 1920x1080 resolution. Many argue that this simply isn't necessary if your screen is too small or if you sit far enough away. There is more involved however.

I suggest you check out this excellent article at The Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity. It includes an excellent discussion of interlacing/deinterlacing, the 60Hz interlaced NTSC system, upscaling/downscaling, 3:2 pulldown, 24p film to 60i conversion and how all this relates to 1080p. If you find yourself confused by a lot of these topics, it's an excellent primer.

Three comments I found of interest...

"there is an abundance of 1080p24 material out there, encoded into 1080i60 format. If you want to view it at its full potential, you need not only a device capable of displaying it, a so called 1080line TV, but the ability to actually de-interlace it properly."

"if you want to view the inherently 1080p24 content which is out there (and even native 1080i content) with maximum resolution (and we maintain that an enthusiast who sets up their viewing environment to get the most out of it can see the difference), you need a display capable of 1080p that keeps the signal in a 1080 line format from input to display surface."

"when scaling up, more resolution can be of pretty significant advantage in the preservation of fine detail, even with low resolution sources."

Considering that we still watch a lot of standard definition content these days, this last point is an important one.

If you want to know if you should go 1080p with your next set, this article will point out that the answer is a definitive YES!