10 Month Update! Permanent Burn-In On OLEDs & QD-OLED Monitors

at its core burin is related to the longevity of a TV which is why it's been such a focus on this test while Burnin is inherent to OLED technology manufacturers can compensate for it through software designed to improve the usable life of your panel fortunately for you manufacturers implement this well meaning that permanent burning isn't that big of a concern for most folks unless you're using an ultrawide OLED monitor that is hi I'm Abby from ratings.com where we've now reached over 5,000 hours of runtime on our longevity test in our last video we did a deep dive into short compensation Cycles a feature of OLED TVs that accounts for temporary image retention you can watch that video here but we'll do a quick recap later in this video we're going to look at permanent burden we'll discuss what it is what manufacturers do to delay its impacts and what you can expect from your OLED TVs and [Music] monitors contrary to what its name suggests burning has nothing to do with fire and everything to do with the nature of organic compounds all OLED panels have an electroluminescent layer made up of organic compounds that are responsible for creating light giving oleds their name organic light emitting diode and the cool thing about these compounds is that they have one predictable trajectory degradation and eventual death as the pixel degrades the brightness decreases eventually the whole panel will be affected but certain areas May deteriorate faster than others depending on your use resulting in differential wear the affected areas appear dimmer than the others around them giving Burnin that signature scorched look degradation can be worsened by playing bright content with elements appearing in the exact same spot repeatedly because of its inevitable nature manufacturers incorporate features into the TVs to compensate for permanent burning and try and make your panel look fresher for longer we call these mitigation features long compensation cycles and when compared to short compensation Cycles it can be confusing so we'll do a quick recap here to show you the difference short Cycles last under 10 minutes should occur after four plus hours of cumulative usage are called pixel cleaner refresher panel calibration cycle screen optimization and remove accumulated temporary image retention caused by TFT drift by contrast long compensation Cycles vary in length from a minute or so on newer panels to an hour on older panels our advertised on some models to occur at intervals ranging anywhere from 500 to around 2,000 hours of cumulative usage are called pixel refresher panel refresh or just pixel refresh and compensate for permanent electroluminescent layer degradation it's important to note that these long Cycles don't fix the pixels and return them back to their outof the box State they aren't some sort of OLED philosopher stone instead they try to establish uniformity across the panel now we don't know exactly how they're doing that but we have some theories just nothing concrete yet what we do know is the visual impact these Cycles have on your TVs as mentioned we've now accumulated over 5,000 hours of runtime on this test so most of our oleds that have a long cycle built into the software should have run at least two of these Cycles by now we can check to see how many cycles have run on some LG models where there's a cycle tracker in the service menu but for others like Sony and Samsung models we really can't be sure if they have run any long Cycles during the test all we can rely on is what we see on the screens in general we found that like with short cycles Long Cycles also seem to run differently across Brands and panel manufacturers let's take the first example of the Sony a0j we discovered in our last investigation that the Sony a0j wasn't performing shorts Cycles on our test resulting in a lot of accumulated image retention on screen when we run a short cycle it already improves drastically but what about the long cycle after running the panel refresh Sony's long cycle the AJ's burn in appearance has significantly improved almost to the point where there's no visible burning save for the faint hint of an outline I'm going to take a beat here to distinguish what we're seeing on the left we have 5% gray uniformity slides on the right 50% gray uniformity slides we use the 5% slides to better see what's going on with the panel as even subtle differences in brightness are much more noticeable when the screen is dimmer the 50% slide is more representative of what you'd see at home just watching TV this is the full impact these long Cycles can have in an ideal scenario this is how it would always work burn in is well compensated for and the panel appears to maintain a uniform brightness across the screen on the other Sony oleds like the A90 J and A9 90k the panel refresh performs similarly these two models didn't improve as much as the a80 J but this doesn't necessarily mean that the a9k and A90 J are more prone to bur in as for the QD OLED model the a95 K well it didn't really improve much at all but it is important to take these results with a grain of salt as there could be software differences and how this compensation algorithm Works across models and differences in panel manufacturing tolerances Etc like the Sony oleds the LG oleds also exemplify how these Cycles are supposed to work the LG oleds run their Cycles automatically on an interval schedule of 2,000 hours for the older models like the A1 B1 C1 and G1 and 500 hours for the recent models like the C2 C3 G2 and G3 the B2 is an outlier though more recent it is on the older cycle LG models call their long and short Cycles the same thing which is obviously confusing so if you're going to manually run a cycle it isn't clear which one you're running it depends on how frequently your TV runs the long cycle but the simplest way to see is just by opening the pixel refresh window and checking whether the TV asks you to wait an hour indicating that you can manually run a long cycle or wait 10 minutes for a short cycle for those at home who may be worry about running these Cycles we've received some good insights through our communication with manufacturers notably LG display shared with us that you can run long Cycles whenever you want without harming the panel you'll likely experience diminishing returns after running a single cycle but you will be able to address image retention on your own at home after our last video pointed out that the Samsung s95 C didn't run its short compensation Cycles as intended Samsung display reached out to us to let us know that that was the result of a bug a firmware update should fix the issue and the s95 C will run the short Cycles automatically as intended but that's not all about the s95 C Samsung display also let us know that the s95 C doesn't run long Cycles but that's by Design instead it uses what they call enhanced realtime compensation we don't know exactly what that means but it does imply that the s95 C is continuously running compensation algorithms instead of waiting for a certain threshold of cumulative hours to run one big cycle whether this improves things and makes the s95 C twice as reliable as claimed remains to be seen in the long run but when compared to the the s95 B at the same point in the test yeah the s95 C looks much better so far Samsung's new approach to mitigating burin on the s95 C appears to be working the s95 B however appears to be using the same approach found with the Sony's and LGS instead of enhanced realtime compensation the s95 B required you to manually run long Cycles after 2,000 to 2400 hours of use considering the times we live in I think it's fair to assume that only a handful of people actually remembered to do that fortunately Samsung released a firmware update for the s95 B so that the TV will just do it itself our s95 B does something a little funky with its long cycle as you can see instead of matching the brightness the s95 B overcorrects with the affected pixels instead coming out visibly brighter than the surrounding ones and yes this is noticeable in real content as well which is a new type of distracting we suspect that over time these over brightened pixels will end up degrading even faster than they would from just playing CNN as they're likely receiving more current to Output more light resulting in Faster wear of course with a sample size of one we aren't too sure if this is just our unit or something that these TVs do in general so s 95b owners let us know if this is something you've experienced after you've run the pixel refresh function all this knowledge is great to know if you want to buy an OLED TV but OLED monitors are slowly starting to creep into the sphere and at this moment the question on everyone's mind is whether they should be of course for gamers it's hard to compete with the near instantaneous response times and stunning HDR performance and the Deep blacks make places like the underd dark even more immersive but like us many of you have questioned how they handle Burnin we have three OLED monitors on our test the lg27 gr 95 qeb using LG display wooled panel the alien wear W 3423 DWF and the Samsung Odyssey OLED G8 both using a QD OLED panel from Samsung display now when we look at all three of them in their Baseline State they don't look too bad the Burnin is much more noticeable in the 5% slides than the 50% slides which is what we expect but the Burnin pattern is painting an interesting picture when we first put these monitors on the test we had them display CNN with the default 16x9 aspect ratio we then learned from Samsung display that this caused some unintended consequences namely the black bars along the sides in 16x9 mode lowered the average Picture level resulting in the display driving the center of the screen where there was more action to a higher brightness subjecting it to more stress higher stress usually results in Faster wear so it only took 700 hours of running it at 16x9 mode for heavy differential wear to occur this also had impacts on the Dell monitor as it uses the same panel so for fairness we changed all the screens to display CNN in full screen mode the result is that the sides of the screen where content didn't play in 16x9 mode appear brighter than the center of the screen which has seen much more action this difference isn't super visible in real content you'll really have to be looking for it to see it once you do notice it though it won't go away running long cycles does improve the appearance and since we've switched to full screen mode the difference between the center and the sides has lessened but had we continued to blast CNN at 16x9 it's very likely that this damage would be irreversible and noticeable interestingly The Odyssey G8 was the brightest of all three monitors in SDR that was until August 2023 when Samsung released firmware update 1520 which disabled the peak brightness setting in SDR mode now the G8 has the same brightness as the alien wear monitor both of which are noticeably brighter than the LG as to why Sam throttled the brightness when that was a key selling point of this monitor well we're not sure of every reason but it is safe to assume that this will result in reduced stress on the panel from less current running through it essentially you're trading brightness for longevity and while it's great that Samsung does these continuous firmware updates and it is really great that they listen take feedback and are constantly trying to improve their products consumers should at least know when their features are being traded off and why so they can choose whether or not they want to make the trade as for the age-old woled versus cue OLED debate we still stand by our original claims that cue oleds appear less resistant than Weds regarding burning at least for first generation panels at this point the next generation of TVs seems to show some promise as we've seen with the s95 c appearing better than the s95 B but we're not sure if this applies to all second gen cutie oleds due to potential software differences at this point we recommend using an ultrawide QD OLED monitor only for gaming General browsing and watching movies or TV shows especially with a 16x9 aspect ratio should be kept to an absolute minimum it only took 700 hours for screen damage to occur on these monitors or the equivalent of using it for 2 hours a day for a year which really isn't all that much time of course there's then the issue of warranty if we take this year-long example you could experience Burnin within that time frame but whether the manufacturer actually covers Burnin depends on your region and where you buy the product some manufacturers like Dell State outright that Burnin is covered under warranty some others aren't as forthcoming if you're concerned it's best to check directly with the manufacturer or wherever you bought it it's important to note that everything happening with our oleds is exactly what we expected the concept is simple the brighter the pixel the more wear over time and we're constantly blasting our oleds at their maximum and stressing them out with a stream of static content obviously no sane person would use their oleds like this at home just know that if you do you are more prone to developing Burnin over time Burnin is inevitable and inherent to OLED Tech but it takes time to significantly accumulate especially if you're watching varied content for that reason we won't stop recommending OLED TVs I mean in terms of picture quality they're pretty hard to beat and in terms of longevity they're at least performing how we expected them to with which is more than we can say for LCD models for now that concludes our 10-month update stay tuned to our channel for more updates from our longevity test and for some exciting news from our research and development team until next time I'm Abby from ratings.com where we help 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Channel: RTINGS com R&D

Views: 477,674

Keywords: rtings, burn in, burn-in, longevity test, rtings test, sony, samsung, lg, OLED, oled burn in, compensation cycles, remove burn-in, how to remove burn in, lg g3, sony a90k, lg monitor, oled for pc, oled gaming, oled gaming monitor

Id: Fa7V_OOu6B8

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 20 2023