One of the issues that won’t go away with OLED TVs is burn-in or image retention, and it’s required reading for anyone who is interested in buying an OLED TV.
Burn-in is a problem that only affects OLED TVs, which might make you feel nervous about an OLED TV purchase, but we’ll explain why you shouldn’t be, especially if you have a recent model or one of the best OLED TVs.
What is image retention?
Image retention and burn-in describe similar problems but in a different state or severity.
Image retention is where static elements within an image are retained in the display for a temporary period.
Static elements are the areas of the screen that stay in a fixed position, such as a news ticker on the bottom of the screen, the HUD (heads up display) within a video game or the scoreboard in a football match.
Any of these static elements that are on the screen for long periods of time can be retained by an OLED display even when replaced by another image. Image retention will eventually go away but it may come back depending on what you watch.
What is OLED burn-in?
OLED burn-in is much more severe than image retention. A TV that suffers from OLED burn-in is one where the static element in an image is permanently retained in the screen. It won’t disappear or fade away, appearing as a ghostly image on your screen.
This can be distracting, especially if the image retained is a different colour from what’s currently on the screen. In that sense it’ll be unmissable.
Should you be worried about OLED burn-in?
In our view you shouldn’t be worried about image retention or OLED burn-in, especially if you’ve bought an OLED TV within the last few years.
It’s a different story if you have one of the earlier OLED models. Although we can’t be exact, we’d say that any OLED TV produced before 2019 may be more susceptible to problems with image retention considering that these TVs used an earlier form of OLED technology.
However, with responsible use, image retention and burn-in don’t have to be TV-ending problems. As long as you don’t leave your TV on for hours and hours with static images on the screen at the highest brightness possible, you should be fine. High usage of an OLED TV in this manner will cause problems but TVs have built-in safety features to stop this from happening. You can read our explainer about burn-in and image retention to learn more.
Turning your TV off can help resolve image retention problems, while there are several built-in safety features that will stop your TV from developing burn-in altogether. OLED TVs will carry out maintenance when turned off to avoid image retention and these features have gotten better over time.
Image retention will always be a background problem, but it’s becoming less of an issue with each passing year. You can be confident that OLED TVs will last several years before image retention even becomes an issue, let alone OLED burn-in.
