Will power cycling my LCD screen burn it out?

Reader Bob Deschner writes (edited for clarity):

Does turning off a TV or LCD computer screen to save energy damage the screen? I'm worred about frequently powering my monitor on and off numerous times in a day. Will it shorten the lifespan of the screen?

This worry likely stems from many readers' childhood days, when mom said that turning the lights on and off a bunch would make the bulbs burn out. (Anyone else spend time trying to burn out a bulb by flipping the switch rapidly when they were a kid? Yeah, I never got a bulb to burn out that way either.) Mom was probably just annoyed at our behavior... but was she right?

I posed the question of whether LCDs can be damaged by frequent power cycling to a number of manufacturers of these screens and got pretty much the same response from everyone I asked: There's no risk. Don't worry about it. The power savings from having an unused monitor turn off far outweigh any cost associated with the risk of failure to the monitor, which is pretty much nil.

The good folks at Gateway provided this extensive response to the issue if you're interested in more technical details:

We are unaware of any physical or electrical limitation/damage that can occur by turning a LCD monitor 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.

Vizio, which makes LCD TVs, added that the only component that might be damaged by excessive power cycling is the switch mechanism itself. In other words, turning your TV or monitor on and off by pushing the power button 30 times a day is no problem, but 3,000 times a day might actually break the button clean off. The LCD itself would probably be just fine.