OLED burn-in test
Solid colours and greys, full-screen. Burn-in shows as a faint outline of something that was on screen for a long time: a taskbar, a channel logo, a game HUD. It's easiest to see on 20–50% grey and on single colours.
Where to look
- Bottom edge: the Windows taskbar or macOS dock.
- Top edge: browser tabs and address bar, menu bars.
- Corners: TV channel logos, game minimaps, stream overlays.
- Centre: crosshairs and static game HUD elements.
Check each colour separately. OLED subpixels wear at different rates (blue and red wear fastest on many panels), so a burned-in shape may show on red but not on green.
Retention or burn-in?
Play varied full-screen video for 30 minutes, or turn the display off in standby for a few hours so it can run its automatic compensation cycle. Test again. If the ghost faded, it was temporary retention. If it's unchanged after several days of normal use and standby cycles, it's burn-in.
Don't over-test. Leaving a full white screen at maximum brightness for a long time is itself hard on an OLED. A few minutes per check is plenty.
If a single dot stays lit on every colour, that's a stuck pixel, not burn-in: see the dead pixel test. For near-black banding and unevenness, see the uniformity test.
Questions people ask
What is the difference between image retention and burn-in?
Image retention is temporary: a faint ghost of a static image that fades after minutes or hours of varied content. Burn-in is permanent uneven wear of OLED emitters, most often from taskbars, logos, HUDs or news tickers shown for thousands of hours.
Do LCD monitors get burn-in?
LCDs can show temporary image retention, especially IPS and VA, but permanent burn-in is rare. OLED and older plasma screens are the ones at real risk.
How do I prevent OLED burn-in?
Let the display run its automatic pixel refresh (usually when you turn it off, so don't cut its power), auto-hide the taskbar, use a dark or moving wallpaper, turn on screen savers or screen-off timers, avoid maximum brightness for static content, and vary what you display.
Can burn-in be fixed?
Permanent burn-in cannot be reversed. A manual panel refresh can even out mild unevenness by compensating the wear, but it should be run only occasionally because it itself uses up panel lifetime. Check your warranty: some OLED monitors include burn-in coverage.