How I Almost Destroyed my HDTV - or; Thank God I Bought an LCD

[Ernest Rister]

How I Almost Destroyed my HDTV
or;
Thank God I Bought an LCD

It's a few minutes before midnight. I've been on vacation in the mountains of New Mexico. I'm driving home across the Texas Hill Country to San Antonio when it dawns on me...

In a time honored tradition since I was in my 20's, I chose to leave the TV on while on vacation, just to shoo away any potential thieves. Trouble is, for some reason, every morning, when turning on my set, the first sight to greet my sleepy eyes is a giant blue 4:3 square with a text message reading: "Press Select to Continue". Why Time Warner does this for their HDTV signal in my neighborhood is beyond me (I suspect some kind of anti-piracy measures), but there it is. When turning on the TV in the morning, no matter the channel, I am greeted with a 4:3 blue square obscuring the image, and the message "Press Select to Continue".

In the rush of packing and my wife asking me if I was going to leave lights on and the TV on, it never dawned on me that this Blue Square of Image Retention could autotrigger for a channel already playing...meaning, if the TV is already on, if you have already pressed "select to continue" earlier that day, if the channel is coming in, and its a 16:9 image, and its not a news channel, then we shouldn't have to worry about image retention or the Blue Square popping up, right?

Wrong.

I'm driving back into town. I've been gone for five days. And then it occurs to me...what if that stupid blue square generates every morning -- meaning, its not a question of turning on the set and getting the blue square and the "Press Select to Continue" -- what if that happens every morning, even if the channel is already "selected"?

So 15 miles out of San Antonio, I turn to my wife and tell her that I've just realized something...and that I was concerned about the TV. We haul our luggage up the stairs at 1:00 a.m., and I hold my breath as I open the door.

And then I see it.

A big, giant, soul-sucking blue square.

I set the luggage down, calmly find the remote, and change the channel. My heart sinks.

Superimposed over every HD channel displaying in 16:9 is a new, burned-in, 4:3, high-contrast square. Over ev-ry-thing. I pop in a BRD in some vain hope the burn in won't be that awful, but the exercise turns into a morbid experiment in how bad the burn in actually is. Because there it is, the giant 4:3 contrast square. Like Borg cube of burn in futility.

I'm mortified. Ashamed. I feel like the biggest idiot on the planet. I give my wife the bad news.

I've destroyed the HDTV.

Or have I?

I get online while she gets ready for bed. I find a lot of people selling "burn in repair" CDs. Is that a solution? Seems shady. Someone says the only answer is to have the "projector" replaced. But then I find some conflicting advice...Someone says that an LCD can "self-repair" while Plasmas in this situation would be destroyed. Can that be true? I find more conflicting information...screen shots of burn-in on LCDs, followed by adamant posts that the situation on LCDs is reversible. One recommendation is to display a white image or a snow image for several hours. Another is to just turn the set off and let it sit for a while.

Turn it off and let it sit?

No way I could be that lucky...but I do it. I turn the set off, and go to bed.

I get up about five hours later, go the set after cooking breakfast, and hit the power.

The "burn in" is gone. Well, not gone completely, but its a 90% improvement. By the time evening rolls around, the image retention has vanished. Not even a hint of it. The LCD has "cured" itself of the "stuck" pixels.

I tell my wife the TV is fixed. She says she was't worried, she says she knew I'd take care of it. I tell her I didn't really do anything except read a bit. Meanwhile, I say a secret prayer of thanks to God that I didn't buy a plasma set -- and that's not a dig at Plasma owners, it's just that (allegedly) plasma sets are far less forgiving when it comes to image retention.

So, I'm very lucky, and learned some lessons:

a) Take more time when rushing out the door to think things through
b) The White Sands of New Mexico desert can be extremely cold
c) Amazingly enough, LCDs can "self repair" from image retention/burn in
and
d) In the future, just leave the radio playing.