OLED Gaming Monitors – The Burn In Problem…

The biggest fear most people have with using an OLED monitor as their primary display is the ever-dreaded burn in effect. For those that don’t know, burn in is when the microscopic LEDs that make up an organic light emitting display end up showing the same thing on screen for a long enough time – say a Windows taskbar or game HUD for example – the LEDs wear down such that no matter what they are showing, they have the silhouette of the burned-in content. It is one of the biggest drawbacks when it comes to an OLED panel, and is something that people are somewhat rightfully afraid of when it comes to using an OLED especially for your primary display. 

But actually, are you right to be afraid? Is burn in a problem you are actually likely to experience with an OLED gaming monitor? Well, as with everything in life, it depends. For some panels, especially from my testing the LG W-OLED panels like in the AORUS FO48U, even with really pretty low powered-on-hours counts, it had pretty significant burn in. with any fullscreen non-black colour it was clear the taskbar had burned into the panel. In fact, even some file icons from the desktop had burned in, which considering it had only been on for just 280 hours when I got it. The good news, at least for this panel, was that it just hadn’t run its wear-levelling function the whole time, meaning once it ran that function, it looked good as new. 

I think this is a good time to talk about the various protections monitor manufacturers have baked into these displays to keep the burn in at bay. The one I’ve already mentioned, the “pixel refresher”, is a kind of wear levelling that essentially refreshes the panel, but equally cuts the lifespan on the pixels down. Seeing as all these monitors are still pretty new it’s pretty hard to say how long they’ll last with regular usage, but seeing as Philips offers a 3 year warranty on the EVNIA 8600 I’ve been using daily, I’d expect it to last at least that long, and likely a fair bit more too. There’s normally two different types of the pixel refresher too, the one that runs daily, and the one that runs after 1000, 1500 or 2000 hours (depending on the panel type and manufacturer’s choice). The former is a more light pass, just a touch up to help ensure burn in doesn’t start, let alone dig its heels in. The latter, often called a “Panel refresh”, is a more invasive pass. It takes a lot longer – an hour or two – and is the one that takes a decent chunk of lifespan out of the pixels. Although, since this only runs after 83 days of panel usage time, even if you work from home and use the panel every day for 12 hours a day, it’s only going to do that panel refresh twice a year, and for more conservative usage of 4 hours a day (every day in a year), it won’t do it for over a year. 

For the AORUS FO48U I mentioned, that’s all the user-controllable features, although on the EVNIA there’s a couple more. “Screen Saver” is basically a brightness dimmer after like five minutes of inactivity. If no pixel changes colour for something like five minutes, the panel dims itself. It’s still perfectly visible if you were, I don’t know, reading something, and you can bring it back to your set brightness by just moving your mouse on the screen, but it helps extend the lifespan of the panel. There’s also the pixel-orbiting mode, basically shifting the whole displayed frame up, down, left and right by a pixel or two each way, every few minutes or hours depending on your setting. There are also non-user controllable settings, like the Adaptive Brightness Limiters you find on W-OLED panels. These can be distracting, basically by allowing a peak brightness value for a short time, then ramping the brightness back down considerably. This was really obvious on that FO48U, where in a small window the white background was remarkably bright, but fullscreen it was incredibly dim. My open source response time tool captured it really well – you can see here how it peaks at one level, then slowly tapers down to a lower level. That’s the ABL doing its thing. 

I think it’s worth noting that, at least from my admittedly limited experience, the QD-OLED monitors I’ve had in have been a little better on the burn in front. The EVNIA 8600 I’ve been using as my primary display for a good couple months now has zero burn in visible, and I use it all day every day. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s on between 10 and 12 hours per day, and still, nothing. Picking a QD-OLED generally also avoids the pixel layout issues you run into with W-OLED panels, as QD-OLEDs generally use a pretty standard RGB pixel layout, whereas W-OLED’s use WRGB or RWGB, which can make text look blurry, smeared and generally difficult to read. The only downside is that the QD-OLED panels seem to either be TVs, or come in ultrawide resolutions like my EVNIA, so if you’re looking for a regular 16:9 panel, you’ll generally only find W-OLEDs, at least right now. 

Back to the topic of burn in, it’s worth noting that you do kind of have to baby these things if you want them to last. I have Windows turn my displays off after three minutes – partially for the OLED and partially as a bit of a hack for ADHD – plus I keep the panel at a relatively low brightness (60%) as I’ve set up my displays so they aren’t in direct sunlight and therefore can be a lot dimmer than you might otherwise need. It does the pixel refresh every night, and I’ve got the screensaver on “Fast” and Pixel Orbiting on “Normal”, because neither bothers me that much and they should help extend the useful lifespan of this thing. It is a shame that something that’s relatively expensive is so fragile and needs to be babied to eke out the most life from it, but that’s the joys of getting in still relatively early. It is worth noting that there’s a very good chance your phone uses an OLED panel, and save for a few edge cases where burn in creeps in, the vast majority of panels don’t have any burn in at all, and lead plentiful lives, with things like the battery failing long before the display does. 

So, can you use an OLED as your primary display? Definitely. Is it going to last quite as long as an LCD equivalent, well probably not, but I doubt it’d be a significant difference, and during that time you get a phenomenal experience. Instant response times, infinite contrast ratios, and often vibrant colours to boot. It’s an amazing experience, and I’m incredibly happy to have one as my main display. If you’re interesting in picking one up, I’ll leave a link to the EVNIA in the description!