Burn In Question

famicom

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Is it possible to completely avoid burn in or is it just a matter of delaying it? For example if you never run the game for more than a couple hours at a time and let it rest for a couple days does it matter? Or is it just going to happen if you play a certain game for x # of hours?
 
Burn-in is caused by displaying the same thing in the same place for very long periods of time. Long enough for the phosphors to become heated to the point of darkening. It takes a rather long time to do this. If your games are only on for a couple of hours at a time, I don't see how you'd develop screen burn, provided none of your games sit at the same screen all the time (i.e. the Ms. Pac free-play screen).

Remember that the burn-in you see in an old game is the result of many years of service. Service that usually meant being turned on pretty much all the time.

I wouldn't worry about it.

-Ian
 
I tune all my monitors to run darker, it might not look as pretty in most instances, but all my collection is operated commercially and I try to do this to curb burn-in.

for what it's worth, back before I understood the concept of brightness and contrast, I used to run them high on an Extreme Hunting and the credit screen did burn in, and the same thing happened on Street Fighter Alpha 2.. which is now 3, but you can see the SFA2 credit screen burned in now too. lol

the easiest way to do it is to find something of a happy medium between the Screen/G2 and Brightness adjustments to where black backgrounds are not visible, you don't want black to look like a brown, for instance, you don't want to see it at all... that's what your Brightness should be set at. Contrast I was told you run as high as to where bleeding of text (usually you'll see green streaks) is gone.

once you do those, now set them both a little bit lower to your liking. it cuts down the possibilities for burning in then, cause above-mentioned phosphors won't be running as.... hot?

yeah.
 
I'm just not sure if it is an overall hours of displaying an image or kind of a "fatigue" meaning not only displaying the same thing but without any down time.

Either way I know it takes a lot of hours to actual occur. My question is basically, does it take 1000 hours (arbitrary #) of displaying the same image or 1,000 hours straight?

I think RetroHacker more or less answered my question. ty
 
I'm just not sure if it is an overall hours of displaying an image or kind of a "fatigue" meaning not only displaying the same thing but without any down time.

Either way I know it takes a lot of hours to actual occur. My question is basically, does it take 1000 hours (arbitrary #) of displaying the same image or 1,000 hours straight?

I think RetroHacker more or less answered my question. ty

It is from displaying the same image for 1000 hours straight.

If you have ever seen a vector monitor, you may have noticed that it had a dark dot in the center of the screen. It is very common on vectors because when the deflection fails, the beam just points in one direction and does not move. It burns a lot quicker because that one spot gets all the beam's energy all the time.

In the case of a raster, the beam is drawing the screen 60 times a second so the process is slower. If the same image is constantly displayed on the screen, those pixels will get burnt if it is left on for a long period of time. That is one reason why games have attract mode, to slow down the process even more.
 
I'm not buying that manufacturers gave a second thought to screen burn, much less how to avoid it, back then.
 
I'm not buying that manufacturers gave a second thought to screen burn, much less how to avoid it, back then.

You're right, it probably was more of a marketing thing. But for us it is desirable the have "freeplay with attract mode" for this reason
 
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