So, if you own a beautiful Plasma TV and a Nintendo Wii there are two things you need to be aware of:

Number 1: Throwing Wii-motes at any flat-screen tv will not result in a pleasant moment for you or your television.

Number 2: and much more importantly, is the very real risk of plasma burn in.

Plasma televisions have a layer of a phosphor material built into the screen. It is this phosphor that reacts to an electrical current to produce an image on the screen. The thing with phosphor is that it actually gets "used up" very slowly over the life of the tv. Don't worry! A new Plasma TV has a life expectancy of about 50,000 hours. That's nearly six years of continous non-stop viewing (that is of course if you remember to keep your Wii-mote strap good and tight.

When viewing "normal" programing on your tv the random images causes the phosphor to get used up evenly through the life of the set. Burn in happens when the phosphor worn out more in some areas of the screen than everywhere else. This can really only happen if an image or some part of an image remains static on the screen for too long. This is where video gamers like us can have a problem. Lots of games have meters, gauges, and score indicators that don't move. If these games are played for extended times these on screen items can leave behind faint but visible impressions of themselves that may never go away.