Few things strike fear into the hearts of A/V enthusiasts like OLED burn-in. It describes the permanent imprint of a ghostly afterimage on an OLED screen after extended use — a phenomenon that, once upon a time, kickstarted the downfall of plasma TVs.
These days, OLED TVs of every make and model come with an array of preventative measures for burn-in built right into the software and the hardware itself. This makes them better than ever at side-stepping the searing effects of burn-in.
Unfortunately, despite the sharp reduction in risk, burn-in is still very much a real possibility on even the best OLED TVs for people who habitually put static images on their TV for several hours at a time.
If you consider yourself a power-user and you want to check in on the health of your OLED TV, there’s a simple way to check for burn-in at home — and it’s the same method I use in the TV-testing lab.
How to check for OLED burn-in without equipment
As mentioned, there are plenty of ways to prevent OLED burn-in using the tools built into your TV along with a touch of common sense. But if you suspect that your OLED might’ve been visited by the ghost of pictures past, listen up.
Burn-in can be mercifully hard to see during everyday content, but that subtlety stops being convenient during scenes that emphasize the contours of whatever has been burnt into the pixels. Therefore, in order to diagnose your display, it’s necessary to recreate a scenario in which burn-in would be more obvious to the naked eye.
YouTube user Garabet uploaded a convenient video several years ago that I’ve often relied on when testing TVs in the lab. You can run this OLED burn-in test video on your TV’s YouTube app (or via whichever streaming device you use).
The video will cycle through several test patterns, all of which are solid colors or shades of gray. The uniform nature of these full-field images are more likely to reveal OLED burn-in than the busy details of everyday content.
In my experience, burn-in is more likely to materialize along the top, bottom and sides of an OLED TV. This is where news chyrons, sports tickers, channel logos and video game HUD elements are most likely to reside.
What can I do if my OLED TV has burn-in?
First, it’s important to separate legitimate burn-in from other, potentially non-permanent visual artifacts commonly associated with OLED TVs.
For one thing, OLED TVs sometimes arrive out of the box with vertical or horizontal banding across most or all of the screen. They usually manifest as straight lines of varying widths, and can often be resolved by running your TV’s Pixel Refresh function.
In addition, while not guaranteed newer OLED TVs — particularly higher-end OLEDs that leverage RGB Tandem-style panels — sometimes show subtle, vertical bands when large portions of the screen are displaying certain shades of gray. This is different from the banding described above in that it’s inherent to the hardware and can’t be removed via Pixel Refresh. Fortunately, it’s next to impossible to see outside of hyper-specific circumstances.
I regret to inform you that there’s no tried-and-true way to reverse OLED burn-in.
But if you’re witnessing big, cloudy blobs of discoloration, streaky banners at the bottom of the screen or the ghostly outline of a CNN logo, in all likelihood, your OLED TV has received some burn-in. I regret to inform you that there’s no tried-and-true way to reverse OLED burn-in.
However, while it might come across as cold comfort, I can almost guarantee that you’ve made the most out of your TV — either over the course of several years or many hours of continuous, daily use.
If you’re ready to shop for a new model, many of the best OLED TVs on the market today — like the LG C6 and Samsung S95H — are better equipped to avoid this, and entry-level models like the LG B6 OLED are more affordable than ever.
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