Being an Early Adopter SUCKS

[Music] [Applause] hi i'm linus sebastian and you may remember me professing my love for lg's oled displays in youtube videos like every other monitor is dead to me and my endgame gaming tv well now that i've been daily driving one for the past few months i'm going to show you everything wrong with it and hopefully how to fix it what about today's sponsors mr sebastian haha thanks jamie but you know i would never forget to tell our viewers about our sponsor glasswire instantly see your past and current network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device with glassware use offer code linus and get 25 off at the link below when i reviewed the 48-inch lg c10 earlier this year i loved it so much that as soon as david got his own and returned mine i dumped my old monitor setup and put it in my office and all of the great stuff i said about it still holds up its high refresh rate and unbeatable pixel response times make it among the best gaming displays on the market and it's inky blacks and great color performance make it super comfortable to use for everything else be it movies spreadsheets the whites that is why i'm still gonna have an affiliate link to it below but before you click on that this burn-in is a result of snapping my windows into the four corners of my display a pretty common thing to do on such a large monitor and wendell from level1tx who has been daily driving one of these for longer than me has also hit some snags it is amazing but what's not amazing is that i'm starting to see signs of burn-in it's unsettling it's just enough to be unsettling yeah mine too but lg thought of that and maybe just maybe we can fix this with a feature that's built into every oled display that i'm aware of that lg calls pixel refresher start now hopefully that works i guess we'll find out soon enough but while it's running let's talk about burn in a little more because there's a lot of mixed messages out there including from us on the one hand you've got manufacturers like lg saying it's not a problem and on the other hand you've got tech experts like wendell saying i would say that with heavy use you know 6 8 10 hours a day you can only count on these things lasting about a year maybe two what's the truth as usual it's somewhere in between but to understand why we need a bit of background to start with the term burn-in is a relic of the crt days when your monitor was as big as a microwave and your tv was the size of an oven it's also a total mischaracterization of the problem because burn-in refers to ghost images that were quite literally burned into the luminescent phosphor coating on the back of the glass of those older style displays here's an example that is so extreme that the dmv stopped having to even turn the tv on anymore but we continue to use this term because even though the mechanisms are different the behavior of modern displays can be very similar so whether you're talking about a crt lcd plasma or an oled if you display static or non-moving images for extended periods of time you might eventually see them as ghosts that haunt your other content so this type of image retention can affect nearly all direct view modern displays the only difference is how likely you are to encounter it for lcds which make up the majority of tvs and monitors today we could more accurately describe this phenomenon as image retention because it's typically caused by the liquid crystals losing their ability to easily return to a relaxed state we don't talk about it much though because it's pretty uncommon unlike lttstore.com we talk about that all the time look at this great desk pad as for oleds a more apt term would be burn out and that's because oleds don't have either a phosphor coating or any liquid crystals to get stuck each pixel of an oled display actually each rgb sub pixel is an individual light source and from the moment it first powers on it is deteriorating and the brighter each one of those little candles burns the faster it will dim now obviously this gradual weakening isn't going to be too noticeable if every pixel gets used exactly the same but how likely is that to happen in the real world so to combat this educated oled users can employ a number of tricks to extend their lifespan i've been running this monitor super conservatively my oled brightness has only been around 60. i left on the uh you know the logo compensation thing where it tries to detect the logo or you know like the start menu and it's like oh let me move that around a little bit those are some good tips lowering the brightness overall means that each pixel isn't blasting out as much light wearing itself out logo compensation tries to surgically dim static elements on the screen like sport score bugs or news channel logos and screen shift or pixel shift takes the whole on-screen image and tries to kind of move it around by a few pixels every so often in hopes of at least softening the transitions between the more burned out pixels and the less burned out ones but as you saw when we began this video even a few months of use was enough for me to overcome all of those protections my brightness by the way was usually set to 80 and i also have pixel shift and logo compensation enabled let's take a look at our results shall we wow okay hold on that is a lot better it works but there's bad news the way it works is it runs a horizontal line down the screen over a long period of time in an attempt to basically even out the wear on all the pixels so you could think of this approach sort of like sanding out a scratch from a wood floor yes the damage is far less noticeable but only because you intentionally wore away the wood around it and as you'd expect this kind of thing doesn't work forever the pixel refresh function of the display does help when you turn it off it's supposed to automatically do that on its own but i think it's kind of diminishing returns at this point text in in certain areas are not quite as sharp as it used to be and uh i've got this sort of weird red splotch in the middle of the screen because you know so much stuff is going on in the middle of the screen great and even if pixel refresher works perfectly for you there are some daily use problems with these tvs that we should have caught in our review one inconvenience is that they don't handle auto wake from sleep the way that a monitor does so you'll have to manually turn it on every time you sit down at your computer but that one's pretty minor compared to the auto dimming issues that barnacles has been struggling with now i understand why lg is doing this remember the whole burn-in thing but when you've got three displays all side-by-side by side something as simple as dragging a window across a border can cause one or more of the tvs to suddenly change their brightness from i think i can see it to eye searing now i on the other hand i'm only running one 48-inch display and i only have to do my little brightness dance when i'm reading or editing a large document for an extended period of time so given that burn-in is a much larger concern for me i'm content to leave the auto dimming alone but if you absolutely cannot tolerate it there does appear to be a fix and there it is that's right we've got it this is the lg service technician remote that can supposedly access menus that are hidden using the regular consumer one all ploof said was play with it shall we okay well i mean can you okay you can do just regular stuff like change in input p check oh crap well now what man how much do i miss having buttons like this instead of just having an input button that you have to click a bunch of times just hdmi too hdmi one dedicated buttons for that i kind of just want this remote to just be this remote can i unp check it sound check oh picture check picture check and sound check that's what it is man there's so many buttons on here let's pee only lg service remote password here we go boys according to reddit it's zero four one three what's so special about that date lg and look how smart this is see the ir emitter is uh angled such that it'll just work if you're just like holding it like this and looking at it that's awesome menu oh hello this all looks like the regular menu whoa hi in start whoa and then we want oled tpc enable off wow whoa hi oh look at that hdr on off just like that i guess normal is auto man this is the kind of thing you could really get into the weeds tuning and by the way it would void the heck out of your warranty so if you ever did need to get any kind of servicing done or even update the firmware on your tv it is strongly recommended that you return all the service menu options to normal and then do it otherwise i take no responsibility for your stuff breaking all right and we're back now is this is this brighter than before this looks terrible just a sec houston we definitely have a problem oh we're in vivid mode you know what i wonder if that's why it looks like crap this still doesn't look quite right it's horrible and then the second i changed this to hdr bet it's fixed yep and perfect now i am going to plug it into my laptop real quick this still looks like absolute dog crap it's doing something to the incoming signal i have no idea what we're gonna put this all back to default exit okay now we are going to do a factory reset i think i found it i think i found it i think it was just super resolution see i thought that was off but i wonder if it's just like a stupid thing where it was turned on then turned off because we are in sdr right now and this looks fine all right good it's back to normal factory reset and then changing settings even though the changing them back doesn't break it again seems fine we need to move on because none of what we've talked about so far supports lg's position that burn-in is not a problem let's talk about that the thing is the oleds on my desks are not the only ones in my life and the 77-inch g10 in my living room has actually been there for about as long as wendell has been daily driving his c10 and in spite of being used daily for not just movies but also games which are notorious for burning in static elements like speedometers life bars you get the point it shows no signs of burn in whatsoever and you'll actually find plenty of similar testimonials from users online so it's clear that oleds absolutely can live long healthy lives doing what they do best absolutely crushing other technologies with their image quality they just clearly require a level of tlc that other display technologies do not which means as much as i agree with wendell i love oled oh my goodness this is like living in the future with this kind of display technology back to you steve [Laughter] back to you linus i'm gonna have to be more careful who i invite to be a guest on the channel i'm also gonna have to be more careful about my display recommendations going forward because even though by the way the service menu thing does appear to have worked these tvs are clearly best suited for customers with more typical home theater use cases and they are only suitable as monitors for deep pocketed enthusiasts who are willing to accept either the downsides like the auto dimming or the cost of replacing them ever so often and they'll also have to accept hearing about our sponsor micro center micro center is one of the best places to shop for all your technology needs they've got great prices and selection on computer hardware and everything else technology at 25 locations across the us they have a growing lineup of business solutions for small and medium-sized businesses featuring workstation computers from dell precision and from supermicro they have experts on staff who can advise and make recommendations for why a server or business desktop or workstation is going to be the right choice for your business they offer services around repairing business systems including replacing components and providing technical support and new customers can check the link in the video description for a coupon code for a free 240 gigabyte ssd no purchase necessary in-store only well that was fun uh by the way if you enjoyed this video maybe check out our video where we fixed a dead cpu

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,838,889

Rating: 4.9351296 out of 5

Keywords: LG, OLED, Burn In, CX, Service Remote, TV, LTT, LMG, LG CX, Image Retention, CRT, LCD, Plasma, Display

Id: hWrFEU_605g

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/WhiteZero]

Pretty much as expected, don't use OLED as a 24/7 work monitor usage scenario. If you vary your content (PC desktop usage, games, TV/Movies), you'll be fine.

[u/nukelauncher95]

I have an OLED PS Vita. The previous owner used it a lot and it doesn't have any burn in. The previous owner bought it on launch day and used it daily until he sold it to me. The screen is still perfect. However, my Galaxy S10 is starting to get burn in and I just got it last year. The status bar and icons are beginning to burn in, the navigation bar burn in is getting more noticeable, but the Chrome tab swither button and the 3 dot hamburger menu button are severely burned in.

I'm going to have insurance replace the screen and the battery before I pay off the phone. I have another year before I pay it off and cancel the insurance, so I'm trying to kill the battery before then lol.

[u/BWandstuffs]

I had written a comment in another subreddit a few hours before this video got posted, about a clip of Linus talking about OLED burn in.

I've been using an LG CX48 for about 10 months now, one of the same displays Linus mentioned he is using. For me, there is absolutely noticeable image retention whenever I use "light mode" apps all day, or otherwise white content like Excel sheets.

To counteract this, I've done my absolute best to use dark mode for everything, everywhere. Dark mode apps have next to no image retention, unless I've left the display on with unmoved windows for 15+ hours. LG's pixel refresher takes about an hour to run and automatically fixes any temporary retention issues there are after you turn the display off after a few hours (You can interrupt it freely if you wish, the TV just gives you a popup that the refresh wasn't able to be completed). White text is fine because of the pixel shift feature: it moves text around enough that the majority of pixels aren't always solid white.

Brightness, both the display's settings and the color values displayed, have an extreme impact on how much image retention there is.

I don't regret buying the LG CX, and personally don't experience the permanent burn in Linus is talking about. Likely because I run the TV in a darker environment without the TV's brightness that high, and "dark mode"ed everything.

I guess if the pixel refresher is actually dimming my display over time, I haven't really noticed that factor all that much. To be clear, I've left all of the OLED saver options mentioned in the video on, at least minimally, and have the pixel refresher set to automatically start after long periods of use. (Fun fact, you can audibly hear the TV click when it's done with the pixel refresh while it is "off", I suspect it's the power actually being cut to the display)

[u/gold_rush_doom]

I dunno man, I thought it was common sense that OLED is not good for static content. No hardware/firmware mitigation can fix the fact that OLED is the most susceptible to burn-in display technology of the moment (so, no, this doesn't include Plasma).

tvOS knows this and will turn on the screensaver to prevent burn-in, but macOS and Windows don't.

I guess we have to wait for apple to integrate OLED into macbooks and add mitigations for this in macOS so that Microsoft will finally add that to windows as well, as all manufacturers do after Apple adds a feature everybody needed.

[u/Orefeus]

I wish I saw this sooner, just a FYI for anyone lucky enough to see this BestBuy Geek Squad Warranty COVERS OLED BURN IN! I'm not even kidding, look it up!

I managed to get a BX for $500 off but used that money and bought the Geek Squad warranty just incase there is burn in

[u/DevilW]

OLED: Burn-in

Linus and all the OLED fanatics: surprised Pikachu face.

In all honesty it's so obvious that it would happen and even tho OLEDs are cool there is a good reason there are few OLED monitors.

[u/DuranteA]

OLED is fantastic at media consumption, but it's just not ready for full-time monitor use for work (and it might never be).

And that's why I find it so incredibly disappointing that Samsung can't get its firmware/controller shit together, because the combination of a fast-responding 240 Hz VA panel with 2048 dimming zones in their Neo G9 could actually provide an extremely high quality HDR experience, including practical contrast levels around 15000:1 -- and do all that while also being capable of being used as a full-time work monitor without worry.

[u/among_bridge_four]

This is why, if you bought an LG CX to use as a monitor, you bought it from Best Buy. You also bought the 3 year Geek Squad protection plan that covers burn in.

For what it's worth, I've had my LG CX for 12 months now and don't have any burn in. But I run at 50% brightness, have a black background, darkmode everything, minimize the taskbar, don't have any desktop icons, and use PowerToys to split my screen and shift where I place things pretty often. Most of the time I've had my LG CX it's been with an IDE, browser, discord or Youtube up. I also turn it off when I am not using it.

[u/warmnjuicy]

Would enabling the "Screen Saver" feature in Windows help with burn-in problems with OLED TVs? So when you are away from the computer, it fills the screen with moving objects which in theory, should lessen the burn-in right?