A particular reason why people enjoy so much the new HDTV technology is that it gives the opportunity to use your TV for more than just the original purpose. Briefly said, HDTV's are not just television sets, they can also be connected with a console or a computer, if the owner likes playing games on a HDTV. While one can use their HDTV for playing video games, how they see fit, there are still some issues, strongly related to plasma that performs less than an LCD. We do not talk about the picture quality, but mostly about the dangers that a plasma screen is exposed to, when playing games on it for many hours.

A word of caution

Computer generated images have one property: they remain on the screen for longer times. If you play, let's say, a first person shooter or a real time strategy, on your console, or your computer, you are quite used to these resilient images, like the gun you hold, or the interface of the game. What does this mean? It means that that portion of the screen is used more for displaying the same image for hours, as compared to the rest of the screen.

While with LCD's, these aspects are not important, with plasmas there is a different story. Playing games on a HDTV can equal disaster, if you have a plasma, and you do not follow some recommendations.

Save your plasma HDTV

In order to avoid exposing your plasma to the dangers of having the screen damaged permanently, you need to follow a certain routine: after you play your games for three or four hours, let your plasma display some movies or television programs.

Never use your plasma solely for playing games on it. It will ruin it at an incredible speed.

New models

The problem that leads to damaging the plasma screen is named "burn in" and it is a result of static images displayed, characteristic to video games. When the damage is done, you will not be able to get rid of the "print" of an old image from the screen, which pretty much says that your HDTV is ruined.

Plasma manufacturers are very aware of this problem and that is why they recommend playing games on this type of HDTV over controlled periods of time, followed by a refresh of pixels, through watching movies, or other fast changing images.

Newer models come with built in anti burn in features, but this does not mean that you can use your plasma for video games half a day.