We even left a fixed image on a Panasonic plasma for about eight hours (sorry Panasonic!) to see whether we could detect a faint burn or ghost, but no such luck. A Panasonic engineer who was not aware of our experiment then told us it would take about four days or more for a static image to burn its ghost onto a modern plasma screen. Improvements in the phosphor material used and ‘pixel orbiting’ technology — which shifts pixels around if they don’t move — has diminished the burn-in problem. It’s highly unlikely that any plasma would be stuck on the same image four days in a row. The myth that plasmas can suffer burn-in overshadows the fact that LCD HDTVs can suffer from something else just as bad: dead pixels.
