LAB NOTES JEREMY LAIRD, CONTRIBUTOR
Is OLED burn-in actually a thing?
Could OLED monitors be going the way of early SSDs?
HOW MUCH OF A THING
is OLED burn in?
That’s hard to answer in normal testing.
We typically get a few weeks at best to review something like a gaming monitor.
That’s plenty for assessing most aspects of a display. You can get a good feel for the image quality, build, features, and so on.
But burn in? That’s much harder to judge.
Of course, long-term durability is always difficult to measure. I remember when the first consumer SSDs came out to fairly universal rave reviews. Then it turned out the drives wore out pretty quickly. While SSD durability remains difficult to gauge, the technology has improved. But what about OLED panels in PC monitors?
If you look at the latest long-term OLED test results from Rtings, just about the only outfit currently having a stab at this problem, they make for worrying reading— for monitors with Samsung’s QD-OLED panels, at least. Rtings only has three OLED monitors in their test. But after around 3,000 hours of testing, both of the monitors with Samsung panels show signs of burn in. The third monitor has an LG WOLED panel, and as far as I can tell, seems to be fine.