Dental Screensaver 1

A dental screensaver is a type of computer program initially designed to prevent "Phosphor burn-in" on CRT and plasma computer monitors by blanking the screen or filling it with moving images or patterns when the computer was not in use. Today, dental screensavers are also used for entertainment or security purposes. Before the advent of LCD screens, most computer screens depended on cathode ray tubes (CRTs). When the same image is displayed on a CRT screen for long periods of time, the properties of the exposed areas of phosphor coating on the inside of the screen gradually and permanently change, eventually leading to a darkened shadow or "ghost" image on the screen.

Televisions, oscilloscopes and other devices that use CRTs are all susceptible to phosphor burn-in, as are plasma displays to some extent. dental screensaver programs were designed to help avoid these effects by automatically changing the images on the screen during periods of user inactivity. For CRTs used in public, such as ATMs and railway ticketing machines, the risk of burn-in is especially high because a stand-by display is shown whenever the machine is not in use. Older machines designed without burn-in problems taken into consideration often display evidence of screen damage, with images or text such as "Please insert your card" (in the case of ATMs) visible even when the display changes while the machine is in use. Blanking the screen is out of the question as the machine would appear to be out of service. In these applications, burn-in is prevented by shifting the position of the display contents every few seconds, or by having a number of different images that are changed regularly.