3 Years With a QD-OLED – Burn In Update

I’ve been using my Philips EVNIA 8600 for exactly three years now. Three years using a QD-OLED as my primary display, all day, every day. To hear the nay-sayers say it, this should be an unusable destroyed mess by now! Barely usable, entirely covered in burn-in scars! But… is it? Well let’s take a look and see…

The monitor I’ve had as my primary display is the EVNIA 34M2C8600, a third generation QD-OLED panel, a 34 inch 1440p ultrawide specifically, and I reviewed it in mid July 2023. I’ve been using it as my main display for work, gaming, and just chilling watching films, TV and YouTube. I use it pretty much 12 hours a day, although there are a few things I’ve done since day one that might be helping me a bit here. First, Windows turns my screens off after five minutes of inactivity. That’s faster than I would use with an all-LCD setup, but not exactly annoying as it’s only when I’m not using them for five minutes, plus it also sort of acts as an ADHD timer, so if I’m stuck on my phone not doing the work I know I’m ‘meant’ to be doing, the screens turning off is a pretty decent visual reminder to snap me out of it. Second, the monitor’s OLED care settings. I’ve used slow pixel orbiting, fast screen saver, and the panel automatically does a pixel refresh daily, and has only done one full panel refresh in the three years I’ve had it. Since updating the firmware some time last year I’ve had it on for nearly 2000 hours, and annoyingly until the firmware update I didn’t have an hour count, so I can’t say for sure how many hours it had before that, but I do know it was at least 1500, although it was almost certainly over 2000, possibly over 3000 since I did the firmware update a bit after the two year mark – so in short I’ve used this for something like 4000-5000 hours. I know that’s only 4 or 5 hours a day of panel on time, but when you account for days I’ve been away, time with the panel off while I’m filming or testing up here, or having dinner, that’s probably about right. Also, I use it at 50 percent brightness these days, although I did use it at 60 percent for the first year or two, which might also help, since more brightness means more heat, and therefore more wear. Oh and the fan is set to auto, which means I never hear it. Lastly, I use everything in dark mode ( I would anyway ) so that might help too, but I’m perhaps even more conscious of it on this thing.

All of that to say I’ve used this a lot over the last three years, and while I’ve tried my best to take care of it, I haven’t gone out of my way to run it on 1 percent brightness, only use it for gaming, make sure to move windows around constantly, like I just use it as my main display. I write all my scripts – including this one – on this thing, and Chrome and the million tabs I have are the main thing that’s on here most of the time. If I’m watching a video or show on my 16:9 LCD above this one, my Home Assistant dashboard is open on the OLED, and that’s all pretty static. It’s dark, for the most part, but it’s static. Same with the taskbar, I keep that up. It’s the small icons, sure, but that doesn’t disappear. That’s there 95 percent of the time I’m using the monitor. The only time it isn’t is when I’m gaming. So, is there any burn-in?

Well, yes, but also no. I filmed these clips in the middle of my day, meaning it’s been a little bit since it did its last refresh, and I think it’s been like 500 hours since it did the full panel refresh, so this isn’t best-case, this is average case. And yeah, using my own tool I use for my open source response time tool (available at OSRTT.com), setting the whole panel to a dark shade of grey, you can see a bit of burn in basically at the taskbar. The icons specifically. I’ve had to pump up the camera a fair bit to get this to really show up, mind you, but yeah by the middle of the day if you have a very specific shade of grey across the whole screen, there’s a bit of a shadow where the taskbar icons would be. Interestingly there isn’t the same for where the Chrome tabs normally sit, nor the clock and tray, nor the window controls in the top right. It’s only the taskbar that you can see something. 

The thing is though, on basically any other shade of grey, you can’t see anything. And actually in games – I’ve picked PowerWash Simulator 2 because I’ve completed it recently which means I’ve spent a lot longer than I’d care to admit cleaning virtual stuff instead of cleaning my real house – you can’t see anything. There’s no evidence that hundreds of hours have been spent displaying my Home Assistant dashboard. You can’t see the taskbar – even if you deliberately line up a dark-ish grey floor there. To see any evidence of burn in you absolutely have to go looking for it. 

You might also argue that the panel refreshes are cutting down on the total light output the panel can offer, but my response is… so? One, it’s only done it once in the three years I’ve been using it (which I think was a bug in the original firmware as it should have happened every 1500 hours, but I’m no worse off for it only having done it once so who cares) and two, I use it comfortably at 50 percent brightness. I turned it down from 60 percent because it’s more comfortable for my environment to have a touch less light output. So what if it can only do 220 nits peak now instead of 239 (a degradation figure I’m hypothesising by the way, not a factual figure) when I only want 140? 

The one thing I would say is that this is kind of to be expected, right? I mean this monitor came with a three year OLED warranty, so if Philips thought these panels would be unusably bad at this three year mark, they wouldn’t have offered that warranty. Whether or not my daily-driver use is what they had in mind when they made that warranty bet, I don’t know, but I guess the true test is how it holds up over the next couple years. With that said, I have not noticed a single issue with the panel in those three years – besides a bit of jank with this new firmware version and the pixel refreshes picking a weird time to do it now, but still – and it’s otherwise been a pretty seamless and phenomenal experience to use. It’s still plenty bright, vibrant, rich, sharp and smooth, and I’m still incredibly happy to have it, and to be using it every day. So much so that I convinced Philips to let me steal the exact same panel in the 34M2C6500 form for my racing and flight sim rig! That’s how much I enjoy, and trust, these panels. Of course I’m also excited to see what a fourth generation QD-OLED panel has to offer in terms of longevity, since they are 30 percent more efficient than these third gen ones, but I don’t think there’s a 1440p ultrawide available yet and I’m still damn happy with mine so I’m in no rush.