So, new Plasma TV!

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The “ghost” images are usually called “image retention” and it’s perfectly normal for a plasma TV. The more you use the TV, the less you’ll see these ghost images. This is what the break in period is. Generally, after the first 200 hours or so, you start to see far less image retention. The other safety measures you listed are all to protect against image retention becoming a problem. That is to prevent them from really getting stuck and burning into the screen for very long periods of time (burn in where the images absolutely never go away doesn’t really happen with current plasma sets, but the image can still hang around for a long time).

As a plasma owner, the biggest tip I can give you is to not obsess about image retention. Just enjoy whatever you’re watching/playing and whatever ghost images that might be on screen will generally be gone before you know it. If you set the TV on a black screen and look really hard, you’ll almost always find something, but whatever is there will usually get wiped away after watching a movie or playing a different game.

Do keep in mind though that the severity of the imagine retention (how long it stays and also how visible it is) is directly related to how long an image is on screen. So don’t be stupid and leave a game on pause for 2 days or something. If you see something that worries you, just put on a regular TV channel (preferably one w/out a network logo and stretched to full screen mode) and leave it on for a while. This should clean away most image retention.

As far as the brightness and contrast settings, turning them down is dual purpose. The higher the brightness/contrast, the less time it takes for image retention to occur. So keeping them low helps prevent image retention. The other reason to turn these down is that pretty much all TVs (or at least plasmas) are shipping with their brightness/contrast (and often sharpness) settings turned way up. As far as I know, they do this so they look more vibrant when on display in stores where there’s tons of lighting that drowns out the light from the TVs. So, unless you have extremely bright lights in your home, you’ll want to turn these down anyway to get a better picture. It’s worth spending a little time with the brightness, contrast, and sharpness settings to get nicer picture. All three should usually be lowered from the manufacturer settings.