OLED Burn-In Put To The Test: Real Threat Or Overblown Concern For Gamers?

hero gigabyte aorus fo32u2p oled monitor

If you’re reading HotHardware, you probably already know that displays based on Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, or “OLEDs”, have a lot of advantages over more conventional liquid-crystal displays (LCDs.) They offer essentially-instant response times, highly-saturated colors, and inky blacks that make for decent final contrast ratios despite relatively lacking brightness compared to LCDs.

The critical weakness of OLEDs is that they’re much less durable than LCDs. While modern LED-backlit LCD monitors can easily last for a decade, even under heavy usage, OLEDs are subject to image retention, more commonly known as “burn-in” after the similar problem that frequently affected old CRT-based displays. If a static image is displayed for too long on an OLED, it can permanently damage the subpixels and leave a shadow of the image, visible even when the screen is showing other content.
How severe is this problem, really, though? Is it something that should put you off of buying OLED screens? Or is it a minor issue overblown by paranoiacs and curmudgeons? Renowned display review site RTINGS has been performing long-period tests of display durability, including (but not limited to) OLED burn-in, and the results are pretty conclusive—but your take-away may not be.
rtings uniformity testing
The monitors are still doing well after 18 months of 24/7 CNN torture testing. Image: RTINGS

The site’s testing includes over 100 TVs as well as a small handful of monitors, and it says that “after 18 months, all OLEDs are now showing signs of permanent burn-in.” Apparently, Samsung displays are among the most resilient, while a Vizio OLED is apparently the worst, with the words “Breaking News” and “2024” clearly visible even with other content on screen. In fact, RTINGS called the display “nearly unusable” at the 14-month mark.

But for the monitors’ part, the testers say that there’s been “very little change” since the 1-year update. At that time, the site said that the CNN “Breaking News” bar is barely visible, but critically, that it only shows up on test slides. With real content, it’s apparently not noticeable. That bodes well even for users who play games for long periods where the UI remains visible on screen, like Final Fantasy XIV or Minecraft.

What does this tell us? Well, there’s clearly burn-in on the displays. For some people, that will be enough to say “no OLEDs for me, thanks,” and we can’t really disagree. If you’re a real purist, any burn-in is going to affect the image, even if you can’t necessarily tell at a glance. However, a barely visible image that really only manifests as a brightness difference on test patterns after 18 months of extremely abusive usage doesn’t sound particularly concerning to us.

rtings TV burn in
Bad examples from three big vendors to show you can’t simply shop by brand. Image: RTINGS

If you’re someone who plays a wide variety of games, or only plays games occasionally, we can’t imagine worrying too much about image retention on your OLED. Likewise, if you are at the PC relatively infrequently and the display will spend most of its time off or in ‘suspend’ mode, then you similarly should not be concerned. It’s only really in the case that you play a single game for long hours at a stretch and leave the display on when you’re away from the PC for extended periods that OLED burn-in should be a major concern for you.
Perhaps the most interesting part of RTINGS‘ investigation is that the TVs with the greatest failure rates have actually been low-cost edge-lit LCDs. Apparently, 64% of edge-lit LCDs have had some sort of significant failure during the brutal marathon testing, while only 30% of full-array or direct-lit TVs (including OLEDs) have had some kind of major issue.

In any case, at this stage virtually all OLEDs have warranties of three years or more that explicitly cover image retention, so that’s another point to consider. Ultimately, while image burn-in is absolutely still a thing with OLEDs, as long as you’re buying a quality display from a reputable vendor that stands behind its warranties, we wouldn’t worry about it too much.

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