If you’ve spent any amount of time hanging around video arcades, you’ve no doubt come across a machine or two that, no matter which new board the arcade operator subsequently installed, still had a hazy Pac-Man map burned into the CRT. We’ve come a long way since then when it comes to display technologies, and the components currently in use are much more resilient than those old, heavy monitors, but even today, after-images can still be a problem. Some users who have gotten their hands on the early Nexus 7 tablets to emerge from Google I/O have noticed these models exhibiting some particularly bad ghosting effects.

The image above shows just how bad things can get. The picture in the inset was displayed, full-brightness, on the Nexus 7 for just about two minutes. That’s probably a bit longer than most of us would keep a still picture on the screen during normal use, but it’s still a far cry from being excessive (if it took hours of burn-in time to produce this effect, we’d certainly care a lot less). As you can see, even when jumping back to the home screen, the after-image continues to persist. It supposedly took an additional two minutes before that ghosting faded.

We know that Google and ASUS were all about keeping costs down when designing the Nexus 7, and the low price at which they’re able to offer the tablet will no doubt go a long way towards its success, but choosing a display component that has these issues is just a bit embarrassing. We also wonder how persistent this effect may be across other IPS LCDs. Perhaps some more experimentation is in order?

Source: Android Police