How do you do a manual "whitewash"?
Can you test it for us? I want to see how long it really takes to remove an image using the whitewash...according to a lot of guys the whitewash is really faster. Regular cable viewing daw is the slowest way to get rid of I.R's!
Sir ninjababez is right. The white wash feature burns the entire screen.
May white wash pa ba ang bagong Panasonic? I think Panasonic is so confident about its phosphors that they consider the white wash and pixel shift functions as useless features.
The white wash function is a barbaric remedy for burn-in. If the screen's phosphor has some burned areas, what it does is to burn all of the phosphors. It doesn't restore the burned areas to their former unburned condition --- it actually burns the whole screen to darken the unburned areas.
Your screen ends up cleaner --- but darker. Needless to say, the white wash function shortens screen life.
It's important to distinguish between burn-in and image retention. Plasma users already know the basic distinction that burn-in is permanent and IR is temporary. But what is the underlying cause? Why is burn-in permanent? Why is IR temporary?
Burn-in results from uneven phosphor aging. A white wash is probably the only way to clean up the screen. "White wash" is actually a misleading name, since it doesn't whiten the screen; on the contrary, it actually darkens the entire screen. But that's marketing for you. Calling it "burn-all" would be more accurate, but that would be one hell of a scary name. Definitely not marketing-friendly.
On the other hand, IR results from a residual charge in the plasma cell that goes away after the charge in all cells eventually equalize. IR has nothing to do with phosphors, so a white wash feature would not help at all.
Here's how the Plasma Display Coalition describes IR:
From this test, image retention appears not to be caused by phosphor burn-in. Rather, it appears to be an accumulated electrical charge within pixel walls. A full white image was displayed for a few hours on the two plasma TVs that showed residual images, after which the residual images disappeared completely. Had the phosphors aged sufficiently, this procedure would not have been enough to clear up the problem.
This points to the possibility of a residual electrical charge accumulating within the individual pixel walls, much like a capacitor. The all-white test pattern apparently cleared this charge. http://www.plasmadisplaycoalition.org/results/image.phpNote that a quick remedy for IR is simply to display an all-white test pattern, rather than to run a white wash function.