Long term OLED burnin testing results
OLED displays are renown for their vibrant colors, popping contrast, perfectly dark blacks, wide viewing angles, and fast response times – making them great for game systems. The cons are that they are dramatically more expensive than LCD, tend to have a shorter lifespan as the organic elements degrade. Most importantly, though, like old plasma TV’s, they are notably susceptible to burn-in. But how much burnin?
Techspot has done a good job stress testing some popular OLED displays over the last 9 months. They have a great breakdown with lots of analysis and pretty good testing scheme.
They also do a good job of explaining things. They note that burn-in with OLEDs is directly related to hours of usage and is cumulative. Mixing in dynamic content between periods of static content usually won’t improve the burn-in results – it’s all related to the cumulative number of hours displaying the same static content on screen. Running at a lower brightness and using dark mode will extend the lifespan because burn-in is correlated to brightness output. The safety features in most OLEDs also seems to really help.
Conclusion: they give a relatively positive update on the burn-in after 9 months of heavy static content usage (around 2,000 to 2,300 hours of total use). They report visible signs of burn-in, but the level of degradation between their 6 month and 9 month reports have been relatively minimal.
The results are that for gaming and content consumption (watching movies/etc) – you should be fine. For those that are using it for work and lots of static work, they do note there are times you can see the burn-in on apps that have large sections of the same color. The task bar at the bottom has also shown to be problematic as are the way they arranged some side-by-side content as many do with large monitors.
But if we’re honest, we were expecting to see more burn-in after 9 months. The levels we’re seeing right now are still very tolerable, and with realistic, sensible usage, we think most people won’t run into proper burn-in problems within the first 12 to 18 months of usage on this sort of QD-OLED panel. Maybe some light burn-in here or there, a few edge cases where you’ll notice it, but nothing that ruins the experience.
I do agree with this statement though:
Getting two good years of usage out of an OLED, though… that’s probably not going to cut it when we’re talking about high-end, $1,000 monitors.
That said all said, OLED is probably not for me right now. If I was just play games or watching movies it might be ok, but I do too much static productivity content all day and really love the flat, large Asus ROG 38″ 4K HDR 144Hz display I currently have (and was on a smoking sale for $499). I will probably keep the display for multiple years as I waterfall them down to other systems. The cost for a similar OLED is about $900–$1200 right now – making it about 2x more expensive.
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