Are Screensavers Useless?

[jason2811]

Is it useless to use a screensaver? Is it better to just put my Macbook display to sleep when it's plugged in rather than having it go to screensaver and then to sleep, is there any point? Thanks.

 

[Killyp]

Some screensavers do have a point. Mine is Apple's RSS feed screensaver that comes with OS X. Works a treat. I have mine pointed to www.somersetsounds.com, a website a friend of mine started up and I help blog on it.

The screensaver is incredibly useful for this because it means I can keep an eye on the blog without having to constantly go into Firefox...


The flashy sparkly ones have no purpose other than to impress your friends.

Putting the display to sleep will lengthen it's lifetime...

 

[dpaanlka]

The flashy sparkly ones have no purpose other than to impress your friends.

Well, the original point of screen savers was to protect CRT's from getting "burn-in" from an stagnant image that remained on the screen for hours and hours. Which is why it is called screen-saver; it saves the screen.

This doesn't really effect LCDs really anymore. They can get a temporary burn-in effect, but it goes away, unlike CRTs, where it was permanent. However if you have a CRT, it is still a good idea, yes.

 

[ham_man]

Screensavers were meant to prevent burn-in, but that really isn't an issue anymore.

What I do is just have the computer shut off my displays after 15 minutes of inactivity. It only sleeps when I tell it to.

 

[lamina]

I've personally seen 'burn-in' on a 23" ACD. Seeing that, I set my screensaver to go on after an hour of inactivity.

 

[Killyp]

Most CRTs nowadays use high frequency flickering and higher quality phosphor matrixes (no I'm not just talking gibberish I work in a TV store). Burn-in is no longer an issue on CRTs. Plasmas do sometimes suffer from it though...

 

[dejo]

If you use the Folding@Home screensaver, you can help in the cure for diseases.

 

[winterdude010]

Well they kinda have use. In terms of a laptop, a screensaver takes less power than having it on constantly so it saves a little bit of power.

 

[Killyp]

Surely a screensaver uses about the same amount of energy as the computer being idle, probably more?

 

[TrenchMouth]

screen savers are a dying breed i think.

if it is tied to a distributed computing program, that is pretty cool. or an rss feed as was mentioned earlier. but other than those two...pretty useless if you have an lcd. but hey...if it makes you happy, it certainly doesnt hurt...

 

[dmw007]

If you use the Folding@Home screensaver, you can help in the cure for diseases.

Proof that screensavers are not useless after all!

 

[dsharits]

Plasmas do sometimes suffer from it though...

Plasmas are horrible for that. I've actually seen a few cases where the owner was watching the NFL draft or something like that for only the two days of the event, and had permanent lines along the bottom and the side of the screen from the tickers that they show during the whole thing.