Can you get screenburn on an LCD screen?
I didn’t think that LCD monitors could suffer from screen burn, but after having my MacBook and 24″ cinema monitor for a while I noticed shadows on the monitor matching patterns, shapes and text in my desktop wallpaper and icons. Technically these artifacts are not the same as the screen-burn you might get on a CRT monitor, however the appearance is similar. I have also found out that unlike CRT screen burn, this is issue is actually very easy to reverse.
The shadows were most obvious when a window containing a dark grey coloured block was on the burnt-in area.
Correcting the screen burn
This was very simple and requires a plain white image to be displayed onscreen for a few hours.
Go into System Preferences, and click ‘energy saver’. Set the computer & display to never sleep.
Create a plain white image in a graphics application such as fireworks or photoshop. Save the image in an otherwise empty directory called ‘screenburn’. The size is not important as is resized to fill the screen, I made a single colour white jpeg image of 640 x 480 pixels in size.
Go To ‘Desktop & Screensaver’ in System Preferences. Add the screenburn folder as an image source and select that as the screensaver picture directory. I also set the hot corners option to enable to screensaver to activate whenever the mouse went to the lower right corner of the screen.
To prolong the life of the backlight, go into ‘Displays’ in System Preferences and reduce the brightness to a low level.
Allow the screen saver to activate (or move the mouse to the hot corner to trigger the screensave) and leave it overnight.
When I did this, I left the white image onscreen for about six hours and in the morning the ghost image had totally disappeared. I then set the display brightness and energy saver settings back to reasonable values.
