OLED Burn-In Test

How to Use This Test

1. Dim the room and set the screen to moderate brightness — burn-in disappears under bright ambient light and is hard to judge at maximum brightness.
2. Click Mid Grey, then Fullscreen. Flat grey is the single most revealing field, because it sits in the brightness range where degraded pixels differ most from healthy ones.
3. Look at the areas where static content usually sits: the bottom strip (taskbar, subtitle bar), the top corners (channel logos), and the centre (game HUDs, dashboards).
4. Use Auto-cycle to step through the remaining fields hands-free while you study the panel from a fixed position.
5. View the screen straight on. OLED panels shift colour at an angle, which is normal and easily mistaken for burn-in.

Burn-In vs Image Retention

These get used interchangeably, but only one is permanent, and telling them apart decides whether a screen is worth buying or worth repairing.

• Image retention is temporary. A faint ghost of a previous image lingers for seconds or minutes, then clears on its own. It is a transient charge state, not damage, and it happens to LCDs too.
• Burn-in is permanent. The organic compounds in heavily-used pixels have degraded and can no longer reach full brightness, so those pixels stay dimmer than their neighbours for good.

The test that separates them: play moving video full-screen for ten to twenty minutes, then run this test again. A mark that has faded was retention. A mark still in exactly the same place is burn-in.

Where Burn-In Shows Up First

Burn-in follows usage, so the pattern usually identifies how the screen was used:

• A bright horizontal strip near the bottom — a desktop taskbar or dock, typical of an OLED used as a computer monitor.
• A logo shape in a top corner — a broadcast channel watermark, typical of a TV left on one channel.
• A rectangular block or bar in the centre or corners — a game HUD, health bar or minimap.
• A band across the very bottom — a news ticker or sports scoreboard.
• Keyboard-shaped marks on a phone — the on-screen keyboard, or the status bar at the top.

Blue subpixels degrade fastest, so early burn-in often appears as a faint yellow or warm tint in the affected area before any shape is clearly visible.

What You Can Do About It

Burn-in cannot be reversed, because it is physical wear rather than a software fault. What the built-in tools do is even out and slow down the damage:

• Pixel Refresh / Panel Refresh — most OLED TVs (LG, Sony, Panasonic) run a compensation cycle that recalibrates pixel brightness. It runs automatically after a few hundred hours and can usually be triggered manually from the picture settings menu. It reduces visibility of mild cases; it does not remove burn-in.
• Pixel Shift / Screen Shift — nudges the whole image by a pixel or two periodically so static edges do not always land on the same pixels. Leave it enabled.
• Logo Dimming — automatically darkens detected static bright elements.
• Lower overall brightness — the single most effective prevention, since degradation scales with how hard the pixels are driven.
• Hide the taskbar and use a dark theme if an OLED is your desktop monitor, and set a short screen-blank timeout.

Does This Apply to LCD, LED and QLED Screens?

No — and this matters, because most screens are not OLED. LCD panels, including LED-backlit and QLED models, do not develop burn-in, because their pixels are shutters in front of a shared backlight rather than individual light emitters. They can show brief image retention, and they have their own distinct faults: dead and stuck pixels, backlight bleed and clouding. If your screen is an LCD and a mark will not go away, run the dead pixel test instead — you are likely looking at a stuck pixel or physical panel damage.

Not sure which you have? OLED shows genuinely black blacks with no glow in a dark room, and has no visible backlight bleed at the edges. The system info tool can also identify many built-in laptop and phone displays.

Buying a Used OLED TV or Monitor

Burn-in is the main depreciation risk on a used OLED, and it is invisible on normal content — which is exactly why sellers can list an affected set in good faith. Run this test on the panel itself before paying, with the lights down and in fullscreen. Ask what the screen was mostly used for: a set used for one news channel, one game or as a desktop monitor carries far more risk than one used for mixed viewing. Check the dead pixel test in the same session, and work through the full used monitor checklist before you commit.

Frequently Asked Questions