Two weeks ago, I had to abruptly leave my client’s site because I tested positive for Covid. I instructed them to power off the equipment, and for the most part they succeeded. Just arrived today, and saw that my DS1054Z was left on. In fairness, I had sitting way up on top of a rack, so it might not have been immediately obvious. Well, at least it wasn’t a CRT.
I can’t discern any issues so far.
-Chris
I would not be very concerned about non CRT/tube equipment. I know a lot of equipment in school and lab settings that is powered on for much longer without issues.
I worked briefly at a agricultural analytics lab, and we left all the devices powered on 24/7, it would have taken to long to power up and dial all the settings(and remember) for each device every morning.
No Issues encountered to my knowledge, the calibrations also never went out of wack ahead of time.
LCD doesn’t have burn in problems as far as I know. Our train network here in Sydney use them as passenger info screens (so displaying almost the same image 24/7) and I’ve never seen burn-in on any LCDs. Years ago the plasma TVs they used would only last about 6 months before burn-in started, and had to be replaced every 24 months.
LCD pixels need to be driven with balanced alternating fields. As long as the image is fairly static, the average current on the pixel should be zero so that there’s no charge migration that results in plating degradation. This would not necessarily be true if you display was changing very rapidly frame-by-frame and the DC average of the pixel was substantially non-zero.
I learned that the hard way when I first tinkered with bare LCD segment glass… 30+ years ago! Those “calculator” type displays on LCD calendars (“free with your subscription of Time magazine!”) would have a continuously displayed digit of months and years – and they don’t burn in. The liquid crystals and drive methods have changed, but the fundamentals of how the electrodes are driven still is the same!
The bigger issue may be wear of the backlight source or the controller ICs themselves. I’ve recently had a client that had LCD faster-than-expected failures due to the limited POH spec of the controller!