Burn-in on plasma TVs a myth?

We have all heard it before.  If you leave your TV or computer screen on the same image for too long the image will "burn" into the screen.  This will cause you to see a ghost of the image that was on the screen for too long.  We now know that our new tubes and flat screen computer monitors do not really do this any longer.  But what about plasma TVs?

If you are reading this you are considering the purchase of a $2,000 to $10,000 plasma television and the thought of burn in on something that costs as much as a used car does not sit well with you.

I am happy to say you can rest easy.  Pioneer Electronics put plasma TVs to the test and had some pretty interesting results.  They found that burn in can occur on modern plasma TVs but the condition is only temporary.  They subjected plasma televisions to 48 hours of a video game on pause and found that there was indeed burn in.  The really cool part about this is that to fix the burn in they simply played a movie on the display for 24 hours to clear the image.

In real life none of us would ever leave our plasma display on for 48 hours with a paused video game image but it is nice to know that it will not mean the end of your TV!

Link to the report: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/pio/pe/images/portal/cit_3424/273087528Pioneer DTV White Paper - FINAL.pdf