Burn-In on OLED: What to Check
Faint, permanent ghost images left by static content — here's how to actually check for it and what reduces the risk going forward.
Burn-in is permanent, uneven wear on an OLED panel caused by the same static image being displayed for very long periods — a taskbar, a channel logo, a game's HUD. Unlike LCD, every OLED pixel is its own light source with a finite lifespan, and pixels that display bright content constantly age faster than pixels that don't, leaving a faint ghost of the old content behind even after it's gone.
How to check for it
Burn-in is easiest to see on a flat, mid-grey or light field, not white or black — the uniformity test set to grey is the most sensitive check available in a browser. Go fullscreen, sit back, and look for a faint shape — a rectangular taskbar outline, a logo, a UI element — that persists regardless of what's actually meant to be on screen. The gradient test can also reveal it as an interruption in an otherwise smooth ramp.
Burn-in shows up faintest on light backgrounds and is often invisible on dark or highly varied content, which is exactly why it can go unnoticed for a long time — the content that would reveal it is the content people watch least.
What actually reduces the risk
- Auto-brightness and dimming, left on — most of the accelerated wear happens at high, sustained brightness. Modern OLED TVs and monitors have logic specifically to dim static elements over time; turning this off for a "brighter picture" trades directly against burn-in risk.
- Avoiding static UI at high brightness for extended periods — a paused video, a permanently visible channel logo, a game HUD left on screen for hours at a time, or an always-on desktop taskbar are the classic causes.
- Pixel-shifting and screen-saver features, if the device has them — these subtly shift the image by a few pixels periodically specifically to spread out wear, and are usually on by default. Leave them on.
- Periodic full-screen colour cycling — using a tool like this one's colour test occasionally to display full-brightness fields evens out wear slightly, though this is a minor mitigation, not a fix once burn-in has occurred.
What doesn't fix it
Once burn-in is visible, it's a permanent change to how those specific pixels respond — there is no software fix, calibration, or "pixel refresher" that restores the original panel. Some manufacturers' built-in compensation cycles can reduce the visibility slightly over many hours, but they don't reverse the underlying wear.