Burn-In Test

What burn-in test does

Burn-in is permanent uneven wear of an OLED panel, where pixels that have displayed the same bright content for a long time no longer emit as strongly as their neighbours, leaving a faint ghost of that content visible on other images. Image retention looks identical and is temporary, clearing on its own within minutes or hours. This page shows the fields that reveal both, and runs a slow wash cycle that can clear retention. Nothing clears true burn-in, and any tool claiming otherwise is not being straight with you.

How to use it

1. Go full screen on the mid grey field and look for faint outlines of anything you display often.
2. Step through white, then red, green and blue, since wear differs per colour channel.
3. If you see a ghost, note exactly what it is an outline of. That usually identifies the cause.
4. Run the wash cycle for at least ten minutes, longer for a stubborn image.
5. Re-check on mid grey. If the ghost is gone it was retention. If it is unchanged after repeated long runs, it is burn-in.

About burn-in test

Retention and burn-in look the same and are not

Image retention is a temporary charge effect: pixels that have shown the same image hold a faint memory of it that dissipates on its own, typically within minutes to a few hours of normal varied use. Burn-in is physical. OLED pixels generate their own light from organic compounds that degrade as they emit, so pixels driven hard for hundreds of hours become permanently dimmer than their neighbours, and that difference shows as a ghost on uniform fields. The practical test is time: anything that clears was retention, and anything that survives repeated long wash cycles is wear.

Why blue fails first

The three emitter colours do not age at the same rate. Blue OLED material is the least efficient and degrades fastest, which is why it is usually driven harder to match the others and why it wears out soonest. That is the reason an ageing OLED drifts warm and yellow overall, and the reason a ghost image often shows more clearly on a blue field than on red or green. It is also why manufacturers use various tricks, from larger blue subpixels to different emitter arrangements, to extend the life of the weakest colour.

What actually causes it

Static bright elements displayed for very long periods: a news channel logo in the corner, a game HUD, a taskbar, a navigation bar, the fixed interface of an application left open all day. Brightness matters enormously, since wear rises steeply with how hard an emitter is driven, so the same logo at low brightness may never cause a problem where at maximum it will. Content that moves and varies causes essentially none, which is why watching films and playing varied games is far less risky than leaving one static screen up for days.

How to avoid it, without being paranoid

Modern OLED panels include real countermeasures: pixel shifting that moves the image by a pixel or two periodically, logo dimming that detects static bright elements and reduces them, and automatic compensation cycles that run when the display is idle. Let those run rather than pulling the power the moment you finish. Beyond that, the useful habits are keeping brightness lower than maximum, hiding taskbars and using a dark theme, not leaving a static image up for hours, and letting the panel do its maintenance cycle. Normal varied use on a modern panel rarely produces burn-in.

LCDs get this too, and it is different

Image persistence happens on LCDs as well, where liquid crystal molecules that have held one orientation for a long period become slow to relax back. It looks similar and is almost always temporary, clearing after the screen has displayed varied content or been switched off for a while. LCDs do not suffer the permanent emitter wear that causes true OLED burn-in, so a ghost on an LCD is far more likely to clear than the same ghost on an OLED.