I have a dell 20" widescreen attached to a mac mini. I noticed while rebooting today that the airport icon in the menu bar along with adium and quicksilver (all the icons that don't change or animate) were showing a slight trace of burn on the blue and gray background when rebooting. the menu icons like ram usage, cpu meter and net traffic (all the ones that change what they show) were not leaving a trace. this is evidence of burning no?

its an lcd connected via dvi and should not be doing this. besides, even if lcd's could burn my display is set to go to sleep after 10 min.

I don't understand.. why is happening? is there anything I can do?

Sounds like good ol' burn in. How sad... Have you tried connecting it to another computer and seeing if the images still stay there?

I read something once (not much help, I know, especially since I don't know where it was) to the effect that LCDs don't get burn-in like CRTs do, but if they get a steady image like that in one area, it might retain the image for a while, unless its given a rest. Try turning it off over night and then see if the ghost images are still there.

I've heard reports of people using blank white images on the entire screen to help cure LCD burn-in style problems, create a blank white image the size of your screen res and set it as a screen-saver, then turn off power saving in your monitor. As I said I've only heard about this and I haven't actually tried this myself.

Yeah, no-one here is far off. If you run an LCD with the same image for 48 hours or so, it can retain an image (the display usually sleeps of course, but try leaving a laptop running hardware test for a weekend and you might see what I mean). 99% of these can be cured however, unlike CRTs.

Man You've gotta love our LCD's! If it's not the backlight issues it's the burning now.