Quote:
Originally Posted by
tubaloth 
Do you have any evidence that using more colors results in a better picture? Or more what is the point of showing the secondary colors (and so forth) when the primary should break in the plasma enough? Right?
The point of breaking in your plasma TV is not to get a "better picture", any more than the point of breaking in a new car is to get a "better engine". The point is to use the phosphors as evenly as possible, to ensure they have all been "aged" equally. This makes them more resistant (but not impervious) to IR.
Breaking in a plasma is especially important if you intend to have it ISF-calibrated. A good calibrator won't even calibrate a plasma TV until it has displayed at least 100-200 hours of full-screen content. This is because the phosphors of a brand new plasma burn differently than they do after a few hundred hours of use, just as a new light bulb will usually burn brightly early on before it finds its level.
So, in summary, the idea of break-in is to get through the first 100-200 hours as carefully as possible, utilizing all of the phosphors as evenly as possible. Since you can't control the content shown on cable or satellite, the best way to do this is with pure color break-in images.
And, the reason I used all the color variations was to "put the phosphors through their paces" (so to speak), by ramping them up and down through the many stages of their power cycles in various combinations. This simulates real-life usage, whereas just putting up a single colored slide (or rotating between a few different colored slides) would not.
Taking the car analogy a step further, you could argue that driving it at either 20, 40, or 60 miles per hour for the first few weeks will break the car in just fine, but the idea of break-in is to expose the car (or plasma) to as much variation as possible early in its life. So driving the car around town for a few weeks at dozens of different speeds between 0 and 60 will be better for the car than just driving it at 3 different speeds the entire time.
A lot of this is conjecture, of course, and some will argue it's not even necessary. But the images are free, they are easy to use (just set them to cycle all night while you sleep or all day while you're at work), and you can be assured that -- used properly -- they will never cause any type of IR on your set because they are solid in color and match the dimensions of today's HDTVs (1080x1920).
I wish I had $1 for every person who has e-mailed me in a panic, asking if my break-in images will repair the "burn-in" that their kids created on their new plasma TV by watching letter-boxed movies all weekend long.
(Answer: eventually, yes, but only if you ensure the images are full-screen and set to rotate. The scrolling bar will also work if used enough times, as will watching full-screen content for a few days or weeks, depending on how bad the IR is.)
