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 workday was over?
Oh, that's good times. But today, you barely see anyone using a screensaver anymore.
I mean, you 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. It's 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 phosphors.
When electrons hit the phosphors, they'd light up, producing an image.
But this process also wore down the phosphors 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 screensaver popular
well into the 2000s. By showing a continually moving image, screensavers prevented phosphors in one area from wearing
down. 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 phosphors. 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 screensaver on most modern flat panels, except in extreme
cases. So why are screensavers still around then? Do they even serve a purpose anymore?
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 screensaver 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 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 screensavers are even interactive, like this one that allows you to play old-school
NES games on the screensaver, but at that point, is it really a screensaver or 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 to you, and there's comments below
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