Q: Instantaneous screen burn-in
I have as my office computer a 27-inch iMac (Late 2012, 3.4GHz i7, GeForce GTX 680MX, currently running 10.9.5). Twice in the last week I have had what can only be described as "instantaneous burn-in" - something that was on the screen for a short period of time (a few minutes, at most) becomes ghosted. In the first situation, the code I was working on was burnt in to the point of being readable after I switched to a darker window behind it. And this code was all code I had written within the last hour - so it's certain that this isn't your typical "left the window open all weekend without a screensaver" burn-in issue. The fact that the code was legible in the ghosted image (when the code, as I was writing it, was constantly in flux) suggests to me that the burn-in happened instantaneously, not even over the course of the hour.
I have in other situations, before and after this incident, left code on the screen for far longer than that (several hours in some cases) and seen no evidence of burn-in, suggesting that whatever happened was momentary and sporadic.
The ghosted image went away within a couple of hours, but now that the issue has recurred (this time with a browser window, which was, again, not on screen for an extreme amount of time, 2 hours at most), it is prompting me to look into other options. Has anyone else had a similar problem? Is this a known issue with this model iMac?
In both instances the ghosted image faded away within 2 hours, but as this is a professionally-used machine which is sometimes viewed by clients, I am mostly concerned that the issue recurring at the wrong time could reflect badly professionally. I'm also concerned that it could be a visible symptom of a deeper problem that may more seriously affect my usage of the iMac.
iMac, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Posted on Dec 22, 2014 9:09 AM
