Anyone tried the 'snow' fix for screen burn?

[jerryspaghetti]

Trawling through the web I stumbled across a conversation where a guy said he put up the 'snow' untuned tv channel display on a badly burned in tube and left it for days and it helped.

e.g. running the following link continuously...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubFq-wV3Eic

It was pretty vague but I guess the premise is that by further burning in the screen in a uniform way, the original burn becomes less apparent. Obviously you'd have to compensate by ramping up the contrast/brightness.

Just wondered if anyone had tried this?

I have a 29" with the dreaded 'INSERT COIN' burn and would be great to be able to make it a little more bearable.jerryspaghetti2023-01-27 07:21:11

 

[_Matt_]

I tried it on my Plasma TV but it didn't work. I definitely didn't leave it long enough though, I was only doing it a few hours at a time.

On plasma I think it only works on image retention rather than burn in.

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Image retention?

 

[chris2922]

Wouldn’t further burning the rest of the screen reduce the overall image quality? If so I’d rather have a faint “credits 0” on mine than do that. It’s part of the charm anyway or so I tell myself.

I imagine developers weren’t concerned about screen burn because they never expected their machines to last long enough for it to be a problem, and parts only made them more money, but it would have been nice if the location of “insert coin” moved about instead of stayed put and slowly destroyed the screen. Same for any other repeatedly displayed information.chris29222023-01-27 08:02:11

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Wouldn’t further burning the rest of the screen reduce the overall image quality? If so I’d rather have a faint “credits 0” on mine than do that. It’s part of the charm anyway or so I tell myself.

I imagine developers weren’t concerned about screen burn because they never expected their machines to last long enough for it to be a problem, and parts only made them more money, but it would have been nice if the location of “insert coin” moved about instead of stayed put and slowly destroyed the screen. Same for any other repeatedly displayed information.

Not sure, I guess there's an inevitable dulling down.

If I had a really knackered burned up tube i'd love to do the experiment.

This one is still totally acceptable when playing Crazy Taxi.

 

[muddymusic]

Sounds like a terrible way to reduce the life of your tube to me. And also a lot of unneccessary electricity use at great expense. Find another tube or just live with it is surely a better option?

 

[muddymusic]

Always drives me nuts when I go to the tip and see all those CRT tubes sitting there. 20" + tvs with zero burn, many of which are suitable for arcade chassis. Yet we can't touch them.

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Sounds like a terrible way to reduce the life of your tube to me. And also a lot of unneccessary electricity use at great expense. Find another tube or just live with it is surely a better option?

Haha, you said it!

Imagine the possibilities if it worked though!!!!

Thanks for your message re. DK art too mate, meant to reply but pondering what to do with the cab. Order for naomi stuff coming your way soon though man

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Always drives me nuts when I go to the tip and see all those CRT tubes sitting there. 20" + tvs with zero burn, many of which are suitable for arcade chassis. Yet we can't touch them.

Might have to start slipping matey a tenner.

If i knew what i was looking for i'd be on it

 

[muddymusic]

It's stuff with Orion and Philips tubes, some of the cheaper brand stuff like Beko and others use the tubes too from memory. Drop straight on to a Polo chassis, lovely jubbly.

 

[pooman2084]

BITD when I bought my trusty Pioneer plasma, the advice was to run ‘snow’ for a few hundred hours before turning brightness etc up to normal levels. That was to prevent ‘retention
which is a less permanent version of screen burn. I got that screen ISF calibrated and it still gives modern panels a run for their money some 16 years later.

For CRT it seems a complete waste of time for screen burn, all I can imagine you’re doing is burning more coating from the tube to make the burn itself less noticeable.

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Exactly that.

Mad curious to see what the trade off in picture quality is

 

[Stevros]

Interesting post, we have 3 Pioneer plasmas (500M and LX5090H) in our home and not one of them has any screen burn at all and there's not a lot of difference between them and OLED panels, beautiful blacks and can reproduce CRT images very easily.
Also have a Pioneer 508XD in the garage and that too has no screen burn.

I think the last of the line Panasonic plasmas (ZT65 etc) were the best however the end of the line plasmas from Pioneer didn't suffer with screen burn due to advances in the quality of the panels themselves.

When it comes to CRTs I got a load from an old betting shop with heavy screen burn and tried to repair and there was no way of doing so, I would think it would take a lot of hours to even faintly remove any insert coin burn and the likes from the phosphor.

Depending on the game it sometimes isn't noticeable so you may be able to use it on another game if you have any others.

 

[jerryspaghetti]

Yeah I think it's 100's rather than dozens of hours so in this day and age, the electricity costs (as someone already said) would probably outweigh the benefits but still....

I'll probably keep the chassis as a spare and see if anyone wants the tube as i'm flat out of storage space. It'll look just fine on most Naomi games to be fair.

Other than that it's the loft for it!

 

[Pharo]

I've got 2 pioneer plasmas 60" and a 42" none have screen burn and they must be 13 to 14 years old and as said above still give some of the more expensive modern TVs a run for the money dreading the day they give up the ghost.