I'm using an OLED Thinkpad X1 Yoga as my primary laptop, and I was afraid of burnin, though almost two years in I have not had any problems.

Admittedly, I was very concious of the burnin issue from day zero and have the screen setup to hide toolbars etc off the screen. I always go into full screen mode with the terminal.

The colors are gorgeous and I feel such a raw sense of visceral delight when using the OLED screen.

At least at the two year mark, I see no problems. Separately I've had an OLED TV for 4 years and I have seen no burnin problems there either.

I have wanted to switch to a newer laptop but I dread going back to a non OLED screen.

This is a great development, and if the choice is between me being a bit more concious of tweaking software settings to go fullscreen and hide toolbars vs. amazing colors, that's a limitation I'm willing to deal with.

Having to micromanage what you do so you don't burn in the screen seems like an endless source of anxiety for someone like me. No thank you.

Maybe it'd help to modify a window manager, to very slowly change the position of things on screen. This would be especially effective with a tiling WM in dark mode, so there aren't any large areas of lit pixels.

There'd be some details to work out, like making sure you don't trigger word wrap changes. One approach would be to leave a little border on at least one of the screen, so you can move everything together horizontally without changing window widths. In the vertical direction maybe you can get away with changing relative window sizes slightly.

(On the other hand, if you're mainly using text in dark mode, maybe your fancy OLED screen isn't benefiting you much.)

If burn-in is a serious threat to the usable lifetime of the display, I wonder whether the laptop could be configured to display a continuously varying image in an attempt to save the screen.

Screen savers won't help, because burn in is a cumulative effect - it's not just reversible image persistence like on LCD's. IOW, it's better to just turn the screen off when not in use. But you can slash the burn-in effect dramatically, at least for non-graphically-intensive use (no picture or video display) by just switching to a theme based on a total-black background, with dark green as the main color and yellowish or reddish highlights. Bonus points for the 1980s "Hollywood hacker" effect, of course!

You can however invert the image. Keep track of how bright each color of each pixel is. Doesn't have to be exact, just average.

Then you can adapt to the fatigue by brightening the pixels with most wear. You can also display an inverse image to even out the wear.

I have vague memories of an application that did this. Guess it was in the plasma days.

Though this is something that could be done in hardware, judging from this clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOcLasaRCzY it must already be done on TVs since letterboxing didn't create any artifacts. But it doesn't seem to be done on a per pixel basis. Not sure why that would be that much more difficult.

> Keep track of how bright each color of each pixel is.

The monitor does not have that capability - if it did, it would be able to compensate for burn-in exactly. You would need to do weird things like point a camera at the monitor and have it diagnose and re-calibrate itself, but this would not be anywhere near exact so you'd still have quite a bit of noise. And everything you do to try and "solve" burn-in, other than turning the screen off, just adds even more burn-in!

You can sorta meet the burn-in half way with a smaller number of thermocouples (temperature is the primary component of burn-in AFAIK) and a wear model related to cumulative energy input. I've been looking to prototype this, but I've not done the work to acquire a panel which I could prototype it on. It'd take quite a bit of fast memory, but not an outlandish amount.

I hope I get a chance to take a poke at it before too many patents are filed.

Not talking external sensors. You already know the brightness of each pixel from the color information and panel brightness.

Great idea! Why hasn't someone already invented this screen-saver type of software?

(That was the joke)

How bad is it?

I ask because I'm interested in a tv and the prices are starting to enter the realm of sanity (IMHO).

I have a 2010 Plasma, and people said that would suffer from burn-in. The only issue I ever had with it is when I left a game or menu up for several hours, and a shadow image would be left. The smudges went away pretty fast when something else got displayed, and all is well 9 years on.

So ... does anyone know how bad the OLED problem is? Is it a bit overblown like the concerns about SSD writing shortening their useful lives? Or is this really something to be concerned about, and the industry is trying to brush it under the carpet?

I watched this burn in test a few weeks ago. It looks like a great test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOcLasaRCzY

These guys are doing god's work. Their website was an impeccable resource when I was buying my first new TV in a decade about a year ago. Absolutely unparalleled quality of reviews for different TV models in the market. Makes the job of cutting through all the marketing B.S. and finding the TV model you really need a whole lot easier.

It started showing some form of burn in for 2016 LG TV model during 2018. But as far as I can tell burn in are still only seen within very minority of users. ( Otherwise you would have read about it on the news ) So if you are not picky, OLED is the way to go. 2017 and 2018, as well as 2019 models all have improved in longevity, and so will the Top Emission WOLED coming in 2020 / 2021, but it will take some more time to test before being sure of it.

Given the price of WOLED panel fall below the price of LCD panel, there will be a price point of OLED tv where it is well worth to buy one even if it might fail in 4 - 5 years time. And that price point will be different for everyone, some consider $1200 55" were good to go, some wait for $1000, some will only buy one for $800.

But if you intend your TV to last for 10 years, then I suggest you wait a little longer.

For regular TV usage, it's probably fine, but I would not recommend buying one to use as a PC monitor. I did that about a year ago, and I really regret it.

Burn in patterns are everywhere, and especially visible in red channels, so the overall image has a greenish hue. Things like taskbars, tiling window borders, browser titlebars, game HUDs (HP bars especially since those are often bright red), have all left their permanent mark on the display, and have become super distracting.

I'll probably get another OLED eventually to replace this one (I'd try to sell the current one but kind of doubt anyone would pay decent money for it given the state it's in), but will probably use it exclusively for movie watching and maybe occasional gaming sessions. I've been completely spoiled by the movie watching experience of the infinite contrast ratio in a dark room. Nothing else is even comparable. But I'll have to babysit the next one much more carefully to make sure it doesn't suffer the same fate as the one I have.

Huh... thanks for the advice. Sounds like you might have a warranty claim there?

(YMMV depending on which country you live in I guess)

Personal opinion from what I am reading around and from owning an oled TV. I am in no way an expert.

I own an oled for 1 and a half year now without issues. From what I read online is that issues with burning might occur after having static images for a very very long time. E.g if you are watching cnn for a long time everyday its static images might burn. Thats my understanding of it. Supposedly also LG has a fix on the new oled models that make burning even much less possible.

Other than that which hasn't happened to me at all, the image is considerably better than any lcd/led model out there.

Again this is just my personal opinion/experience.

Cool, thanks. Was thinking of the newest LG models, probably a C (rather than B) line one. The new tax year is still a couple of months away though!

I've had an LG OLED for 2 years now, and have had no problems with burn-in so far. Before that i owned a Panasonic plasma screen and while it's still pretty nice for the bedroom, it does have Netflix pretty badly burned into it in certain color spaces.

I had Panasonic Plasma before, and LG C7 OLED since a year

The plasma had some burn in of channel logos that was visible on grey background only.

Zero burn in after 1 year with the OLED.

I thought OLED burn-in was something I'd have to just deal with down the road when I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab Pro S (windows tablet), and that the machine was going to be on a two year countdown before becoming annoying.

So far it's been about 30 months with, no issue. I've taken no active steps to fight against burn-in, but also haven't completely disabled the default screensaver (a wobbling word art thing that displays the name of the tablet model after about 5 minutes of disuse). I've been checking for burn-in periodically as I'm suffering from a bit of upgrade-itus, and that would be a fantastic excuse.

No worries, the batteries don't last long anyway.

You're right. For how nice it is, OLED is really a stopgap tech.

The reason samsung never invested in OLED tvs is due to cost and poor longevity.

MicroLED is the same concept as OLED but without the degradation. OLED was simply easier to engineer given current tech, vs manufacturing tiny LEDs.

OLED will be supplanted by microLED. However if samsung can make these displays cheap enough, they will be nice in the interim. I don't expect to see microLED in mass market devices for quite some time.