Burn-in Question (Someone Please Help A Newbie Out)

No, your TV is fine.

If you can't tell any difference, then why worry about it? Any answers from anyone here would only be speculation. Only your eyes can tell you what it looks like, and if it looks fine, then don't sweat it.

Disclaimer: My answer is pretty much an educated speculation. Image on a plasma screen is achieved through burning of inert gas. Black color is achieved by not burning anything. Therefore, there is no burn-in effect on your set and nothing was burning.

the biggest question here is why are you running composite cables from your xbox!?

I'm no expert, but I'm not entirely sure this is true. There is plenty of noticeable light coming from my TV even when the screen is black (no signal). But maybe some plasmas are different than others.

As long as you didn't have an static image on the screen while it was left on, you should be fine.

mproper...I'm not an industry expert either, but I've read before that plasmas could achieve better blacks because LCDs have to produce the color black, while plasmas simply do not produce a color, and therefore show black. That's another way of saying what hoya was saying. I may be wrong here, but it seems right.

Your TV is fine. First of all you can't burn a black screen into your TV. Your TV wasn't receiving a signal so it wasn't displaying anything to burn-in. Second, modern plasma's aren't very susceptible to burn-in. Burn-in is a paranoia carried over from the early days when it actually was a concern. 3-4 hours of a static image is not going to burn-in to your TV. Finally, even if it did burn in it would be uniform across the screen so you wouldn't even notice it.

Big question though: You said you're getting noise from your composite cables please please please tell me that was a typo and you meant component. If you're feeding the finest direct-view display on the market a 480i signal over a composite cable than you have much bigger concerns than burn-in.

Plasmas emit some amount of light, even on a black screen. Some are better than LCDs, some are worse. While in the past plasmas had much better black levels than LCDs, the gap has almost completely closed.

No, you see what you have he is what they call black burn in...Hurry and send it to me and maybe I can still save it before it starts leaking plasma gas and kills the ozone.

Ok I can't even say that with a straight face. Like was already said...You should be ok. I would try to get to the bottom of the cable noise thing though.