What Happened To Screensavers?

remember the days when it seemed like every office computer on the planet endlessly played those mystify your mind or 3D pipes screensavers when the work day was over oh that was good times but today you barely see anyone using a screensaver anymore I mean even have to work a little bit to find the setting to enable it in Windows 11. so why were they so common back in the day well the reason they were called screensavers is that they literally helped save your monitor from an early death rough out there for monitors those bulky monitors that everyone used to use called CRTs worked by blasting electrons at the inside of the screen which was coated with chemicals called phosphores when electrons hit the phosphores they'd light up producing an image but this process also wore down the phosphores over time so if you had the screen showing the same thing for long periods of time such as text or logos the phosphors in those areas would wear down more quickly creating a problem called burn in where you'd see the ghost of those screen elements permanently ooh older CRTs that mostly just displayed text were more susceptible to this than what we used in the days of say Windows 98 but all CRTs have the potential to suffer from burn-in making the screen saver popular well into the 2000s by showing a continually moving image screensavers prevented phosphorus in one area from wearing down and it didn't hurt their popularity that they also looked uh pretty cool and even though you could just turn the monitor off instead screensavers provided a good solution for folks who frequently had to walk away from their systems or who didn't want to wait for their monitor to warm back up after it had been powered off once LCD displays started coming down in price they quickly displaced the older CRTs and with them the need for a screensaver LCDs work completely differently than CRTs they don't have phosphores and while the liquid crystals can get temporarily stuck in one orientation if you leave the same image on the screen for a long time this effect usually isn't permanent like it was on CRTs so you simply don't need a screen saver on most modern flat panels except in extreme cases so why are screensavers still around then do they even serve a purpose anymore we'll tell you right after we thank MSI for sponsoring this video their new MSI GeForce RTX 4080 16 gigabyte gaming X Trio delivers the performance and features that Enthusiast Gamers and creators demand it's powered by the ultra efficient Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture and 16 gigabytes of super fast gddr6 memory the tri-frozer 3 thermal design has three Torx 5.0 fans a copper base plate and core pipes keep your GPU running cool despite all that power learn more at the link below so besides looking cool screensavers are still kind of useful as a screen lock you can apply a screensaver and set it to return your computer to the login screen once someone moves the mouse or presses a key so that your system won't just be completely unsecured if you step away and forget to lock it manually but you can also set your PC to lock after a certain period of inactivity without involving a screen saver at all so are they anything more than purely decorative it turns out that the answer is actually yes particularly for OLED screens the organic LEDs that make up the picture in OLED displays degrade unevenly over time if you're displaying a static image on one area leaving them more susceptible to burn in than other flat panels it's therefore were quite common for OLED displays to have burn-in mitigation features with screensavers being one of them if you've used an LG OLED TV you've probably seen how a fireworks-like screensaver appears after a short period of inactivity and these TVs also move the image very slightly ever so often which prevents burn-in through the same Principle as a screensaver although with less fun pipes and it's not at all a bad idea to set a screensaver if you have an OLED monitor for your PC which are a little more common now than they used to be some screen savers are even interactive like this one that allows you to play Old School NES games on the on the screen saver but at that point is it really is it a screen saver or are you just are you just playing a game on your computer let me know and I'd like to let you know that I'm very thankful for you to you and you there's comments below you can talk about don't forget to subscribe and follow

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 681,276

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Id: Z9uj2q0Ladc

Length: 4min 21sec (261 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022