OLED Burn In explained and how to avoid it

OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) is a specific type of display panel that has become astoundingly popular over the last five years or so. For plenty of good reasons. However, in amongst the positive talk of true contrast, higher color accuracy, and fast response times, there is a negative word on the lips of people who are into nice TVs and Gaming Monitors: “Burn in”. Let’s talk about that.

Burn in refers to the tendency of OLED pixels to seemingly get “stuck” on one color when they should be another. The reason this happens is that if a pixel spends a lot of time displaying one color, it can basically damage itself and not be able to do that color properly, which affects its ability to do other colors, too.

This is why burnt in screens heave a “ghost” of something that used to be there, but is never the color of what that thing was. It’s always a slightly messed up reproduction, because the pixel itself is damaged.

The good news is that burn in takes way longer to occur with modern OLED panels. The technology has advanced to become way more reliable, and aside from that, there are a few tricks that manufacturers use to mitigate the risk.

Take our XENEON 34WQHD240-C QD-OLED monitor for example. This has a couple of clever solutions to minimize the risk of burn in.

The first is called “Orbit” this feature shifts the entire picture by a single pixel, in a circle, every three minutes. It’s imperceptible, too, which makes it a very user friendly solution. The other feature to help is that the monitor will run an “image retention refresh” cycle when you turn it off, but only if it’s been on for eight or more hours. This refresh cycle takes about six minutes.

Despite this, OLED burn in is never going to entirely go away. But good OLED panels now have lifespans comparable to other modern panel types. That combined with the various anti-burn in features mean that OLEDs are no longer the live fast, die young gadgets that they used to be.