This problem likely stems from many readers’ childhood days, when our parents said that frequently turning the lights on and off would make the bulbs burn out. Dad was probably just annoyed at our behavior… but was he right?

Taken from Yahoo Tech News, an author posed the question of the problem whether monitors and LCDs can be damaged by frequent power cycling to a number of manufacturers of these screens and got quite much the same response from everyone he asked: There’s no risk. Don’t worry about it. The power we’re savings from having an unused monitor screen turn off far outweigh any cost associated with the risk of damage to the monitor, which is pretty much dollars.

The staff at Gateway provided this details response to the problem if you have an interest in more technical aspects:

We are unaware of any physical or electrical limitation/damage that can occur by turning LCD monitors on and off excessively by using the power button. It could even slightly increase the lifetime of the display. The major determinant of an LCD monitor’s lifetime is the CCFL (cold-cathode fluorescent lamp) backlight. The CCFL has a phosphor coating which very slowly degrades over time, reducing the strength of the backlight and hence reducing the overall brightness of the display. Most LCD panels have a backlight rated in the tens of thousands of hours of operation (specific rating depends on a variety of factors, including size of the display). When the user turns off the display, the phosphors in the backlight are given a “rest” while it’s off, and hence the lifetime of the display could be slightly extended.

A better recommendation is to use the built in power savings functions in Windows XP and Vista. You can set the power settings control panel to put the monitor into standby after a predefined amount of non-PC usage (as low as 1 minute). This will cause the monitor to go to sleep after the timer expires. Another means of saving energy is to put the PC into standby (aka sleep) manually when it is not in use. This can be done from the Start menu on XP and Vista. By the way, all of our shipping monitors that are 24″ in size or less consume 2W of power while in standby. In the off state, they consume 1W or less. These conform to Energy Star guidelines.

The Vizio company, which makes LCD TVs screen, added that the only component that might be damaged by frequent/excessive power cycling is the switch mechanism itself. In other way, turning your TV or monitor screen on and off by switching the power button 30 times a day is not a problem, but 3,000 times a day is really a big problem for you and might actually break the button itself. The LCD itself would probably be just in good condition.

Specifications

via YahooTech