A pair of brand-new leather shoes would feel tight near the toes, pinch a tad with each step you take, and rub toward the heel. As the leather stretches and conforms to your feet, the above concerns vanish.
The time it takes for the shoe to feel comfortable on your feet from the day you first put it on is its “break-in” period.
Similarly, cars require a break-in phase during which you shouldn’t push the vehicle to the hilt. The break-in period allows the car’s engine to wear smoothly and evenly with consistent, low pressure, smoothly flowing oil and standard operating temperature.
You may now wonder whether electronics have such break-in phases too. Do televisions, for example, need to break in before they could exhibit visuals in all their dazzling glory? Are there specific break-in requirements for a 4K TV?
Read on to find the answers to them all and more.
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Do You Need to Break In a New TV?
While a new television requires some time to warm to your custom picture settings, you need not do anything specific to break in a TV.
Just watching the TV as you usually would eventually result in the TV setting itself in place.
How long would that be? Since there are different TVs made by many manufacturers, there’s no standard number to hit for the break-in phase to conclude.
However, it’s safe to assume 100 to 200 hours of watch time at least (preferably HDR content) shall be enough time for any modern TV to settle itself down or erase some of its kinks if any.
Why Wait for the TV to Break-In?
Although this is not official data, it is believed television panels require time to adjust themselves and carry out internal checks.
Once that phase passes, the TV is more capable of living up to what it promises.
You could liken this phenomenon to how you need to warm up and maybe even do some cardio before performing intense weight training exercises.
Also, once the break-in period has elapsed, you may “calibrate” the TV to your specific needs. Calibrating is essentially adjusting display settings beyond the scope of the TV’s built-in menu to make the television look its accurate best.
Calibrating before allowing the TV to break in could cause a color shift later since the display is still trying to find its proper footing. If you carry out the correction on the very first day, you may have to do some touch-up after 100 to 200 hours of use. You might as well wait out that period.
The calibration process wouldn’t turn a mid-range TV into a high-end set. It would allow the television to showcase its best self.
Display calibration is usually carried out on expensive televisions or monitors because the value return for the effort and money spent is greater, or there’s potential to be tapped into. If you don’t require peak performance, any TV should be good to go straight away.
That said, calibrating after allowing the TV to break-in doesn’t guarantee a lifetime of accurate visuals. As the TV gets older and the tiny LEDs lighting up the display start to age, the color profile is impacted.
You would, therefore, pretty much have to re-calibrate the display over its life at long but regular intervals.
Will Breaking-In Cause Burn-In Issues?
Modern LCDs and LED TVs do not present burn-in concerns. Burn-in is usually a problem with OLED TVs.
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Even then, the burn-in concerns start to show up only after several hundred or even thousands of hours of continual use. The picture needs to be relatively static for burn-in to become an issue.
Most burn-in cases with televisions are due to on-screen elements or fixed images being displayed uninterrupted on the screen for several hours or days continuously, with brightness levels usually at their peak.
If you watch the news on your television or the channel logo stays stationary in any particular corner of the screen, burn-in happens. But that is only with OLED TVs.
With LCDs, “image retention” could be an issue if you churn up the brightness levels and try to push the TV against its limits for hours together, routinely.
Though picture retention is comparable to a burn-in, it’s not the same. It isn’t deeply embedded as the latter, or, in other words, it’s temporary. A burn-in is permanent.
Long story short, breaking-in will not cause either burn-in or image retention concerns since the phase is nowhere long enough to cause those problems.
Do 4K TVs Need to Break In?
Your 4K TV will offer you more details and likely richer, more vibrant colors.
Like any other TV, you may start using your 4K television right on day one. But, for the reasons mentioned above, those colors may not pop up right on day one of use.
Letting the TV play itself or once the break-in phase has passed, your 4K TV would perform just like it’s meant to.
In short, 4K TVs do not require any kind of “break-in”, like every other modern TV set. But if you’re considering calibrating the display, you should not do it during the first few days of use.
As aforementioned, wait for at least 100 hours of use before tinkering with the panel. (More on how to use the TV during its break-in phase later in the article.)
Do LED TVs Need to Break In?
LED TVs do not require a “break-in” per se.
But because any TV usually doesn’t look its scintillating best fresh out of its package, you may have to wait for the TV to come into its own.
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However, as stated several times throughout this article, an LED TV or any television with a modern electronic display is ready to use right on day one.
Just don’t push it too hard.
Do not crank up the brightness to the maximum setting, and don’t leave fixed pictures such as paused frames of video games or electronic program guides on the screen for extended periods.
Even after the TV breaks in, it’s advised not to leave static visuals on the screen.
How to Break-In a New TV?
You don’t have to do anything to break in a TV as mentioned above. Just watch some television for a while, and the “break-in” process would happen independently.
But are there guidelines or restrictions on how to use the TV during its purported break-in period? Well, there are certain things you could or should do.
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If you want the break-in period to elapse as quickly as possible, turn on your television and let it run for hours together—regardless of whether anyone’s watching the TV or not.
Leave the television on a particular channel and turn the volume down. It’s essential you use the content of a TV channel for the test and not a video game or movie since the latter two are likely to have more static visuals, causing burn-in or image retention problems.
Just make sure the TV channel doesn’t have a ticker or a floating logo, as those static elements could also cause a burn-in. News channels, for instance, are not recommended. Also, avoid content with black bars.
Do this testing during the day and not overnight or when you’re outdoors for long since you would not want the TV to be powered on for several hours straight. The TV’s power supply and other components need to have a break.
Three to four hours of a continuous run followed by a 30- to 60-minute break would be ideal.
Do this every day for a week or two, and you should have hit the aforementioned minimum 100-hour mark without having sat through it.
FAQs
1. Does breaking in a TV reveal dead pixels?
If the panel has dead pixels or black areas, those will appear on the first day. You need not wait for the TV to break in to uncover those faulty spots.
Breaking in a TV and screen defects are two different things. The former is not a technique to discover faults with the panel. Instead, it lets the TV get used to its new environment, outside its factory or warehouse.
If you’d like to be sure of the quality of the display, carry out a dead pixel test. That’s essentially running your TV through an assortment of black and white or primary hues to detect the stuck pixel.
2. How well do modern televisions “warm-up” when compared to CRTs?
Cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs worked by electrically warming up a tungsten coil, which heated a cathode in the TV’s rear. That caused an electron emission, regulated and concentrated by electrodes, and shot at the phosphor screen to produce the visuals. The entire process took at least a few seconds.
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With LCD and plasma TVs, light is emitted instantaneously or as soon as the power is turned on. Therefore, modern televisions are ready to roll right away and don’t need to “warm up” like the TVs of yore.
Conclusion
Unlike leather goods, mechanical products, or anything that requires some kind of a “break-in”, the break-in period for a TV is not as distinct or crucial.
If you contact the manufacturers, they would categorically state their TVs don’t require any break-in, which is a valid point to a great extent.
Your TV would not look truly off, or the colors won’t be significantly inaccurate when you turn on the set for the first time—unlike a leather shoe or car that feels stiff or cold initially.
Modern televisions are ready for action right away, and if the display doesn’t look optimal to your eyes, there are options in the TV’s settings to set them right immediately.
But if you are someone who appreciates the details and likes to calibrate displays to your liking, you’d notice any brand-new television display to be ever so slightly off.
In that case, it’s recommended you let the TV play out its “break-in” period so that you can work on recalibrating it to your liking.
Catherine Tramell has been covering technology as a freelance writer for over a decade. She has been writing for Pointer Clicker for over a year, further expanding her expertise as a tech columnist. Catherine likes spending time with her family and friends and her pastimes are reading books and news articles.