How to avoid burn-in

* Burn-in can be caused by black bars. Filling the screen with a moving picture is the safest way to view non widescreen content on 16:9 plasma flat panel and CRT-based rear-projection displays. Leaving the black bars on for an extended period of time can cause permanent damage to the display--often called burn-in or image retention--which often isn't covered by the warranty. Both plasma and rear-projection CRT sets are particularly vulnerable to burn-in during the first 100 or so hours of use. During that time, we recommend you watch without vertical letterboxing at all, and that you avoid still images, such as paused games or television shows. After this initial period, the danger of burn-in is greatly reduced. Other easy measures to avoid burn in include: find a set or a source that produces gray bars (instead of black) to either side of the 4:3 image and/or features other ways to combat burn-in; turn contrast down to 50 percent or lower; balance your 4:3 viewing with more wide-screen material; in particular, sports and animation make good candidates for stretching. Burn-in does not affect LCD, DLP, or LCoS TVs and is much less likely to affect direct-view tube TVs.

As long as your TV or video source has the proper aspect ratio control settings, aspect ratio problems are completely avoidable. Over the next few years, as both hardware manufacturers and broadcasters transition from the older 4:3 format to wider, HDTV-friendly 16:9 widescreen, aspect ratio control will be particularly important.

Understand Native Mode

* Understand native/dot-by-dot mode. Some HDTVs, most commonly 1080p displays, also have an aspect ratio mode that doesn't scale the incoming signal at all. Often called dot-by-dot or native, this mode simply takes the signal, whatever resolution it is, and displays it regardless of the display's native resolution. Depending on the signal, this can either fill the screen perfectly, leave black bars on the top or bottom, or leave black bars on all sides. For example, if you have an HDTV with 1080p native resolution and you're watching a 720p HDTV show, a true dot-by-dot mode will be window-boxed--the 1280x720 program will appear as a rectangle within the 1920x1080 display, surrounded by bars on all sides. (Many dot-by-dot modes only apply to 1080i and 1080p sources, however, so lower-resolution sources like 720p and DVD are still automatically scaled to fill the screen.)

Regardless, the true advantage of dot-by-dot is that, with 1080p displays, every pixel of 1080i and 1080p sources is shown on the screen with no overscan and all of the detail promised by the source. The only real disadvantage is that some sources don't completely fill the screen, so you might see a solid line or interference along the extreme edges of the display. But in general, if you have a 1080p display and are watching 1080i or 1080p sources, dot-by-dot will give you the best picture quality.

Consider these key points- Video Settings

It's important to consider five key points before you decide to buy your widescreen lcd:

* Make sure your video settings match your TV's aspect ratio. Most modern video sources--DVD players, game consoles, satellite and cable boxes, DVRs, and even the video iPod--have an aspect-ratio setting. Make sure you set each device to the setting that matches the TV to which it's attached: 4:3 for standard TVs, 16:9 for wide-screen monitors (nearly all HDTVs). The one exception is for 4:3 TVs that offer a feature called vertical compression or anamorphic squeeze. Video sources attached to these models should be (counterintuitively) set to 16:9, because they're designed to display the full vertical resolution of a wide-screen image within the letterboxed area.