HS Publishing Pixel Protector

I run a small consultancy business and I have the office plasma on Sky News for about 12 hours a day 5 days a week, and both the Sky News logo and the ticker were burnt into the screen. Having searched on Google for some advice I came across the DVD and thought I would give it a try.

The advice from the company is that the white and noise screens should be used in rotation for a couple of hours each, after running the white screen the severity of the burn in had reduced dramatically and then running the noise screen cleared up the remainder. I now use it once a week just on the noise screen and I haven't seen the burn in come back.

I would agree with previous user that it is strange that the DVD is in 4:3 and not 16:9 but I was able to put the screen into panoramic with my set, a Panasonic.

I haven't used the other screen for setting up colour and brightness as this isn't a home installation but that said I think I will try it on my home TV, a Samsung, to see if I can improve the colour representation.

Pixel Protector is advertised to remove screen burn and improve picture quality.

Despite saying its for plasma etc. which are nearly always with a 16:9 ratio, the DVD is entirely 4:3, the first bad sign.

There are some test patterns that are OK for basic settings, nothing that's not on a THX disc though. The only real alignment tests are the cross hatch ones, but these are only of use if you have a projector or rear screen projection set and need to do convergence. Some of the patterns are more relevant to VCR setup, not screens at all.

There are three screens for burn removal, a plain white that will show the burn, a snow wash that shows some encoding artefacts, my concern with this is the artefacts produce fine lines that may produce burn. There is also a colour wash that looks like a out of focus screen saver, but this has blocks of colour that stay much the same throughout, ie not a very thorough wash.

There are also some images of waveform samples that are of no use at all, they also keep referring to Y etc., but Y is merely the shortcut for luminance, like U & V are for the colour difference signals, this makes me wonder about their technical expertise.

There are some overscan tests showing images at various resolution, but since the resolution from a DVD never changes these are somewhat pointless too.

Overall a big disappointment, spend your money on something else.