Will the black bars on my tv burn in?

Question

I have a widescreen flat tv and the cable man said that if its not HDTV i have to stretch the image to fit my tv, if not the black bars on the side will eventually burn in to to screen and when i watch a show showing the full screen it will leave a grey mark where the balck bars were is this true

Answer 1

They can, yes. The trick is to ensure you aren't watching too much 4:3 programming (black bars on the sides). If all you are getting is 4:3 programming then stretch the image so it fills the screen.

Hopefully you are getting HD channels and watching most that are 16:9 (no black bars).

Of course, the above does not matter if you have an LCD or DLP TV. If it's plasma then you'd have a concern after many many many hours of continuous 4:3 programming.