HTPC and plasma, good or bad?

i just got one for my htpc and I do moderate gaming. I did experience some burn in (not image retention). You deffinately have to be more careful with it. I was able to invert the hud of the game i was playing and remove the burn in but it can happen. It may be better if you wait longer than I did to start playing. I was at just over 100 hours.

just make sure to keep a screen saver set to turn on after at most 5 min of inactivity and the worst that will happen is some temporary image retention.

also do not use the PC with the TV within the first 100-200 hours of use, this is the break in period for the phosphors and they are much more susceptible to perm burn in during this period

Hey man, good to hear you were able to fix the burn-in. Can you tell me how you were able to invert the hud? I can guess it would be easy with a PC game, but what about if the HUD was from a console?

If you have orbiter or similar BI prevention tech on your plasma turn them on max and leave them on.

For HTPC, I use the windows 7 background slideshow to constantly change the background randomly every 10seconds or so.

Set the windows taskbar to autohide and remove any icons from the desktop if using the plasma as a primary monitor. Get in the habit of clicking the show desktop button before walking off as well if using it for that purpose to clear off any windows sitting on the screen. If you have a main pc monitor, using the plasma as a secondary display is the best bet.

To echo what other people said, i would avoid htpc use for the first 500-1000 hours or so. I also would not use it as a primary pc monitor. Use it for viewing things like videos etc... and photos. Occasional surfing is fine, but if your primary activities are heavy gaming and heavy surfing you will prob. get BI.

No you had image retention not burn-in. If you had burn-in you would not have gotten rid of it and you would still be staring at it kicking yourself for buying a five year old panel, because current models do not suffer from real burn-in unless horribly abused (and even that may not cause burn-in).

I thought burn-in was just uneven phosphor aging, in which case it can be reversed by simply aging the less-used phosphors to match the burn-in'd ones.