The OLED Burn-In Test: 15-Month Update

Retro · Wednesday at 07:08

This lengthy article on OLED screen burn-in illustrates nicely why I will never buy an OLED monitor as long as LCD remains available. Yes, they're using the monitor hard to bring out the issue faster, but the fact is that LCD would sail through this long term test without a single issue. Sure, it looks great when new and can be much better than LCD, but this is a dealbreaker issue for me. I've seen CRT monitors with this issue, including mine, so I know how annoying it is. Meanwhile, LCDs don't suffer from this at all which is a breath of fresh air. I don't have to worry that a static picture for 5 minutes is gonna add to the cumulative degradation time.

Heck, I previously used a plasma TV for a while with my old Sky box and the momentary animation the bottom left corner when switching modes started to leave an imprint in quite a short time. The TV also caused me eyestrain, that I didn't notice with my LCD monitor, making it a heath issue. I got rid of it after a relatively short time, bought myself a nice UHD LCD TV and haven't looked back. I've had it for over 6 years now, it's still going strong, I leave it with the Sky box interface showing for long periods and no hint of burn-in or other marks on the screen. Bliss. This is how it should be.

The one thing I really liked about that plasma TV though is that it looked like "CRT done right": totally flat Full HD screen and with the good parts of a CRT screen without the negatives like picture shift in shape and size with varying brightness levels, no geometric distortion (this especially annoyed me about CRT) and other things, plus it had a fast pixel response time. It was great in its day, but modern LCDs have easily surpassed it.

Note that the test continues.

The final two paragraphs of the conclusion summarise this burn-in issue with OLED very well:

Two to three years is decent considering we were expecting to see problematic degradation after just a year or so. At least this specific generation QD-OLED panel seems to be a bit more resilient to desktop burn-in than we anticipated.

However, it's still not amazing, given LCDs easily last 5 to 10 years without any issues whatsoever in most circumstances. The power supply is more likely to fail than the backlight itself. We think it's very reasonable to expect a $1,000 monitor to last at least 5 years, so only getting 2 to 3 years of decent use out of an OLED would be disappointing. But we'll see how things go over the coming months.