Screen savers: harmless? Energy-wasters? Why use them?

I think the title asks it all. What do you think? Thanks.

 

Screensavers back in the CRT days were OK for short duration as the phosphors wouldn't be overused or images burnt in but the gun would still continue working thereby wasting energy, same with LCD's but on a much lower energy footprint. If I'm going to be gone more than 10 min. then I shut the screen off. The LCD tube only has so many hours too.

 

Im on the same boat. I just turn the screen off.

 

Screen savers, as augiedoggie stated, were designed to prevent "burn in" on CRT screens, where a screen left on in one position had the image of that screen burnt into it. Screen savers were moving objects designed to remove the burn in, or just designed to cut the input to the screen.

LCD screens do not have the burn in problem, so screen savers are an unnecessary waste of energy. It would be much better to set the computer to turn the screen input off, and windows 7 now disables the screen saver by default.

 

I don't use a screen saver with my LCD and just turn off the monitor when 'puter not in use.

 

"Pretty pictures --- :drool" comes to mind when thinking about screensavers, though the coolest one I found was that flame screensaver that made everything on the screen look like it was on fire and burning up. (I would link to it but I'm not sure of the exact title of the program)

 

Unless one doesn't care about the expense and just loves the pretty pictures!:-D

 

Well, it's not hard to tell what you folks think of screen savers. I kinda liked the idea of having a large analog clock as a screen saver, since both my living room clocks have stopped working. But I guess I'll go with the consensus and just set the monitor to turn off after a set time. Thanks for the input.