can't play 2600 on tv coz of static images? please help!

[ROOP]

hello all

i've been told that i cannot play my atari 2600 woody on a new tv because of some static images on some games may damage the tube in the tv???? what's this all about then? has anyone heard of this? does this mean i'll need an old portable to play the 2600 on? - please help! : )

regards

Roop

[ussexplorer]

I never heard of such a thing from a normal crt television. I might see a problem with the new flat screen televisions. If you want to get ride of interferance you shouldn't use a switch box. Just one of those RCA to F type connectors. They eleminate most static.

 

Laters......

[Ian Primus]

The fact that a TV screen can be burned in by a video game machine is a long standing myth. While it _can_ be done, you would need to have the game on, and running with an unchangeing pattern for a _long_ time before a tube will burn in. Projection TV's are slightly more suceptable, since they use three high intensity CRT tubes to produce the image, and they can burn in more quickly than a regular TV tube, but it will still take a while. There was a thread on it a while back.

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35398

 

Ian Primus

ian_primus@yahoo.com

[Mindfield]

I think by "static" he means "motionless," and he's referring to burn-in.

 

Yes, you can damage a normal CRT-screen if you leave the same static image on the screen for ... say ... three months or more. Though with a 2600 (and 8-bit Atari computers for that matter) if they are left for any length of time they go into "attract mode" which cycles the screen colours and helps to prevent burn-in, so you'd have to leave it for a very long time on the same image to have any kind of burn-in occur. Burn-in is essentially when the same image is left on the same screen for an extremely long period of time such that it permanently burns the screen image into the phosphors of the picture tube. But as I said, you'd have to leave it on the same image for months for that to even begin to happen, and with the 2600 attract mode, even longer.

 

I doubt LCD screens would have this problem. There are no phosphors to burn in, only thin-film transistors that illiuminate tiny pockets of gas plasma. It's possible to burn out the intersecting transistors of one specific pixel on the screen, which would result in a dead pixel, but a static image kept on-screen for long periods of time doesn't make it any more likely to happen.