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For those worried about OLED burn-in
- Thread starter Ocean Dweller
- Start date
My families 2.5 year old LG OLED C2 had a power supply failure last month. Got a replacement ($130) PSU from eBay and it's good as new. Panel itself is flawless. Used for gaming a ton. I think it has around 4k hours.
My parent's LG OLED B6 still going fine. (3D capable goat) It has fast image retention going onto a gray screen, but I think that is normal for that set. Only used for TV so it's been fine. (no idea on hours)
My LG OLED B4 is going with no issues so far. Used pretty much only for gaming. Only around 1k hours.
Sony LCD with dimming zones from 2011 still going strong, no issues at all. (probably has 10k+ hours to it's name)
Samsung from 2017 still going, although it has a dirty screen effect around the edges noticeable on bright colors. (don't know the hours, it was my brother's at one point)
Had LCD TVs pre-2010 but I'm not going to list those as I consider them junk even if they were good due to the old tech.
I have CRTs that work fine which I do use, and one is from 1998. Only my Panasonic HD widescreen from 2004 has hours shown, and it has 5.5K hours and it's nearly flawless.
It would be interesting for others to say their experience along with Rtings tests to get the whole picture (pun not intended)
My parent's LG OLED B6 still going fine. (3D capable goat) It has fast image retention going onto a gray screen, but I think that is normal for that set. Only used for TV so it's been fine. (no idea on hours)
My LG OLED B4 is going with no issues so far. Used pretty much only for gaming. Only around 1k hours.
Sony LCD with dimming zones from 2011 still going strong, no issues at all. (probably has 10k+ hours to it's name)
Samsung from 2017 still going, although it has a dirty screen effect around the edges noticeable on bright colors. (don't know the hours, it was my brother's at one point)
Had LCD TVs pre-2010 but I'm not going to list those as I consider them junk even if they were good due to the old tech.
I have CRTs that work fine which I do use, and one is from 1998. Only my Panasonic HD widescreen from 2004 has hours shown, and it has 5.5K hours and it's nearly flawless.
It would be interesting for others to say their experience along with Rtings tests to get the whole picture (pun not intended)
poppabk
Cheeks Spread for Digital Only Future
"They did suffer burn-in, yes, but only because the test was deliberately designed to torture test them. Every single OLED was affected, but RTINGS reiterates that under normal circumstances, these TVs wouldn't have experienced any burn-in. "
So 100% of OLEDs had burn-in.
So 100% of OLEDs had burn-in.
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Moonjt9
No Silksong? = Delivering the pain.
My personal experience with LG C8 left me with MASSIVE burnin from playing Diablo 2, Path of Exile, and Diablo 4 for around 2.5k hours over a couple years. The skill bar and health globes and buff icons were all burned in and were glaringly obvious on any screen that had solid colors on the bottom quarter of the screen. Like a mess of gray circles and squares everywhere. It was enough that I went with Micro QLED for my newest tv and I will never worry about burnin again.
Oh I forgot to mention dead pixels in various places near the bottom portion of the TV. I'd imagine it's due to all the heat being focused in the bottom third of the tv.
Oh I forgot to mention dead pixels in various places near the bottom portion of the TV. I'd imagine it's due to all the heat being focused in the bottom third of the tv.
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StreetsofBeige
Member
Looks like some of those bargain brands like TCL and Vizio held up better than some of the big names.
Jinzo Prime
Member
Damn, you chose perhaps the worst games to play on an OLED. But this is a good reminder that this tech isn't perfect for every use case.
Kuranghi
Member
This is what I came to post, they did torture them with the same content which most people would never do... but also they all got burnt in so it could 100% happen at home.
When I worked in a major retailer every single OLED except the ones running their own demos, those models had the ability to detect when retention was beginning and could engage the compensation cycle or the 1 hour refresh if it thought it needed it.
The non supplier bay models could also do this but the retailer digital ticketing feed made them auto boot 30 seconds after they were turned off for the pixel refresh so they never got to do it - and thus were all badly burnt-in after less than a month.
All these problems could be solved by the retailer just leaving the TVs on standby for one extra hour at night, but I guess at massive scale even standby mode power adds up.
The brands - LG & Samsung I know definitely was kicking up a big fuss, didnt hear about Sony directly but given they were very badly affected as well so it stands to reason they'd be at least a bit annoyed - Lucky Goldstar & Samson was constantly pushing to go back to only having their own demo mode feed on the screen and a paper ticket, but the retailer put 10s of millions into the digital ticketing system so they didnt want to go back to paper tickets.
Side note: They must've lost a lot of man hours and literal money by doing paper tickets cause they were often wrong and the staff shirked their collective responsible to change them so it wasnt going to get better.
Also staff are pissed at the OLED burn issues since they cant buy the ex-display models for super cheap anymore. Well they can but the TVs are extremely compromised by the burn-in.
As my job was selling Hisense this was a hilarious selling tool since they have no OLED really - its only a 55 and 65", its only on display on Hennessy supplier bays that aren't in many stores + have no takeaway stock nationwide and even delivery stock is in the double digits nationwide - if you wanted to be a cunt (I told them it wouldn't happen in a home setting except without "stupid" usage, ie same game every day, same news channel all day with enough interruptions like volume changing or voice assistant usage so that it wouldn't dim over time to protect itself) since you just say: "OOooOOoo this could happen to yOOooUU" *raises skeletal hand*.
Sornby not saying much was maybe down to them having significantly less sizes of significantly less models on display. They only have 1x 42" and 1x 48" then 2x 55", 2x 65" and 1x 77" and it would be rare for all those sizes to be on display since Hermen, Sampung and Lego dominate the "ranging".
Sonny tend to keep them on their own supplier fixtures where they can control the demos. Its not them being clever though they've just lost a lot of share of business and are struggling to justify ranging them as much.
They wont put the Bravia 9 in this major retailer for example, but thats an LCD not an OLED. That sort of changed in 2025 because they've priced the Bravia 8 very "aggressively" against the S90F and C5 (they made it the same price which is nuts for them).
Sony TVs are traditionally several hundred more in 55 and 65" in the UK. Sometimes that much is justified for people choosing between it and the C5/S90F for many reasons, but then other times the other brands are offering a lot more at much lower prices. Hisense's Bravia 9 equivalent is like a grand less in 65" and 75".
Anyway I'm talking about Sony because they were also controlling the brightness of their OLED TVs based on panel hours rather than actually monitoring the type of usage, so it penalised people who used it sensibly but put a lot of time on it.
They said they will consider changing the behaviour now people know and dislike it, but i dont know if that's a firmware update or new models. Probably the former.
One guy (in the comments of Calebrated's youtube video on "Sony dimming") measured his as having lost almost half its brightness over a few years - ~900 down to ~550 i think it was - because he used it as a monitor 8 hours a day or something like that.
He said he always kept it below 80 nits (in HDR mode) which is really not bright ime.
TL;DR - Burn-in definitely can happen but just don't stop it from running the short pixel refresh cycle if you're watching a lot of similar content or playing similar/the same game and certainly dont leave a taskbar/UI/HUD there all the time as you're constantly interrupting it and stopping it from auto dimming and you will 99.9% chance be fine.
kevboard
Member
yup, and you will get burn in on OLED. it's inevitable.
my Samsung S95B has a visible reticle in the center of the screen. it's only really visible if you display a fully uniform and bright color, and even then it's pretty faint, but it's clearly burn in.
doing some pixel refresh cycles would probably reduce it to be even less noticeable,
but claiming OLED TVs will not get burn in is a straight up lie.
depending on what you play this is a bigger or lesser problem of course. but if you play a lot of shooters, maybe even a lot of the same shooter, that reticle and probably some of the HUD will absolutely burn in over the span of a few years.
Tommi84
Member
ValiantInstance
Member
If you use an OLED as a monitor, odds are you will get an itch to upgrade long before burn in occurs.
I've been using a 42 inch C2 with my pc for over 2 years, including work from homw.
I've been using a 42 inch C2 with my pc for over 2 years, including work from homw.
ShaiKhulud1989
Gold Member
So, I've bought my PC workhorse iiyama IPS monitor and and LG CX in 2021.
4 years later I've changed PSU on iiyama 2 times, LG CX is still working like a clockwork.
Burn-in will of course happen at one point, but probably your LEDs will die sooner (people forgetting that white LED lights do have a time limit before the will start to loose brightness). But with typical mixed content usage even my parents 2008 Panasonic plasma TV has a very slight TV stations mark in the corners after all these years.
4 years later I've changed PSU on iiyama 2 times, LG CX is still working like a clockwork.
Burn-in will of course happen at one point, but probably your LEDs will die sooner (people forgetting that white LED lights do have a time limit before the will start to loose brightness). But with typical mixed content usage even my parents 2008 Panasonic plasma TV has a very slight TV stations mark in the corners after all these years.
FalconPunch
Member
WOLED is way more resistant than QD-OLED. I have owned 4 woled tvs/monitors, no burn in. My first qd oled monitor burned in less than a year into its life. Never buying qdoled again.
Radical_3d
Member
I'm more concerned about people's obsession with OLEDs in 2026. Sure, when I bought my S95C it was the shit to have, but now mini LEDs and soon RGB LEDs are brighter and more affordable (if you don't buy Sony) while having blacks that 99% of us can't distinguish from an OLED's. Sure, last year LG's tandem OLED kept up in brightness but it's an uphill battle.
Cyberpunkd
Member
I don't understand - don't all the modern TVs have pixel micro switching that is invisible to the naked eye and prevents burn-in?
"helps" Those pixels will be in the same spot at some point again, and over time every shift it can do will be used up and start wearing out those pixels. Nothing can be done about that but making sure you don't have the same thing on there for 1000+ of hours.
Von Hugh
Member
There is a big gap between first gen and later gen QD-OLEDs. I wouldn't go that far to generalize.
Imtjnotu
Member
You're mentioning a tv from 2018.....burn in prevention has got a whole fuck ton better since then
Unknown Soldier
Member
The way the emissive displays inherently work makes burn-in a normal function of how they wear. CRT's had this, as anyone who walked through airports in the past can attest. Plasmas had it too, I even owned a plasma that burned in back in the day. And yes, OLED pixels work the same way. When the individual display elements simply wear at different rates, and the way they wear is their brightness gradually becomes less and less, then burn-in is inevitable and unavoidable, just as humans will eventually age and grow old and die
The solution has always been to find emissive display element tech that wears in a different way than progressive brightness loss but if it were that simple it would have happened nearly a century ago when CRT was still the new and hot thing. It hasn't as of 2025
In the end, burn-in is a non-issue if you replace your TV or monitor often enough. Once it's a burned in a bit, throw it in the garbage and buy another one. This is the only real and permanent solution to burn-in. Everything else is just cognitive dissonance and cope
CashPrizes
Member
I had a Plasma from like 2009 until 2015, the burn in from The Old Republic UI was terrible. The UI was like a neon blue and you couldn't adjust it at all for like the first 8 months after launch, and I was playing that game like 8 hours a day.
I got an OLED in 2015, definitely suffered some burn in. I guess I watch a lot of older TV because the black bars on the side when playing 4/3 content made it so that I could always see the brightness difference when games were using all the real estate of the screen.
My latest OLED is a 2022 and it has zero traces of burn in so far.
I got an OLED in 2015, definitely suffered some burn in. I guess I watch a lot of older TV because the black bars on the side when playing 4/3 content made it so that I could always see the brightness difference when games were using all the real estate of the screen.
My latest OLED is a 2022 and it has zero traces of burn in so far.
FingerBang
Member
I have owned 3 OLED TVs and 2 QD OLED displays.
B8 -> C1 -> G5. Widescren Alienware and a 4K 32 inch ASUS one (can't be bothered to look up the names)
The B8 is at my gf's mom and still going strong. No burn-in whatsoever. I've used it for playing all kind of games.
The C1, same thing. It does now have an annoying dead pixel visible on a black screen, but apart from that, no burn-in whatsoever. The G5 is too new to be relevant, but obviously perfect.
I've had the Alienware for 3 years now, use it everyday mostly for work and productivity stuff. If there is any burn in, it's not visible. The ASUS is, again, too early to say, since I've had it for less than a year.
I don't deny burn-in is an issue, but after thousands of hours of use with no issues, it's definitely not the kind of problem most people should worry about. I'll also happily take that risk for the unmatched visual quality you get.
B8 -> C1 -> G5. Widescren Alienware and a 4K 32 inch ASUS one (can't be bothered to look up the names)
The B8 is at my gf's mom and still going strong. No burn-in whatsoever. I've used it for playing all kind of games.
The C1, same thing. It does now have an annoying dead pixel visible on a black screen, but apart from that, no burn-in whatsoever. The G5 is too new to be relevant, but obviously perfect.
I've had the Alienware for 3 years now, use it everyday mostly for work and productivity stuff. If there is any burn in, it's not visible. The ASUS is, again, too early to say, since I've had it for less than a year.
I don't deny burn-in is an issue, but after thousands of hours of use with no issues, it's definitely not the kind of problem most people should worry about. I'll also happily take that risk for the unmatched visual quality you get.
TrebleShot
Member
No one talks about how future proofing these OLEDS are , LG releases a new one every year but honestly my G2 and C2 are perfect I have no want or need to upgrade them any time soon and I have had them for what 4/5 years now?
