I'm Deliberately Burning In My QD-OLED Monitor - 1 Month Update

welcome back to monitors unboxed over the course of the last month I've been purposefully using my 4K 240Hz OLED monitor in a way that will cause permanent burning most people want to preserve the life of their brand new and expensive monitor I've decided to take one for the team and do the complete opposite I want to know how much static application use it takes to see burnning I'm determined to get there it's just a question of how long so what I've done is a simple swap of a 32in 4K IPS LCD for a 32in 4K qdo Leed in my workstation setup no other changes that means no dark mode no screen savers no hiding the taskbar no attempting to do things to prevent bur in a simple LCD to ol Leed swap using the OLED monitor in the exact same way as I was with the LCD all the same bright white application windows and static toolbars with zero or next to zero Dynamic content like video playback and certainly no gaming I use my Workstation daily for creating the videos you see on this channel and Hardware unboxed so I'm frequently researching in web browsers writing up scripts in Microsoft Office editing videos in premere creating thumbnails in Photoshop and so on across these tasks there are crazy amounts of static stuff on screen the windows taskbar toolbars and applications icons even just the general interface there's also dividers between apps when using sidebyside apps all of these elements are at risk of creating permanent Burnin on an old Leed display especially when using the brighter and whiter light mode that Windows offers which causes each pixel to run at a brighter level and has the potential for accelerating burning relative to darker and dimmer modes this is completely not how you should be using an OLED monitor even for productivity work I would always recommend using dark mode minimizing the taskbar setting a black screen safer to activate after just a few minutes of inactivity and looking to avoid static icons where possible to prevent those elements from burning in but for this investigation I'm pretending that I don't know that and have swapped out my LCD for an olded with zero changes in usage a worst case scenario the goal is to see how long I can use the monitor like this before I see permanent burning are we talking weeks months years I want to find out the parameters for this test are as follows no usage or configuration changes swapping LCD to OLED typical workstation productivity usage as I do daily for my job with 95% plus static app usage 60 hours a week of typical usage equating to around 12 hours 5 days a week or around 8 hours a day every day this means that within a typical month I will be using the monitor for 250 hours totaling around 3,000 hours of static use per year the monitor is set to 200 nits of brightness which is the configuration I use in my office and what I used for my LCD as well I have the monitor set to go to sleep after 2 hours the same configuration I had for my LCD I use a dar taskbar with the windows light mode same as with my LCD I am not running the monitor 24 hours a day to allow the display to run it's typical old lead care features like pixel refresh when it enters standby the monitor I'm using for my workstation is the MSI MPG 321 urx and the reason why I chose to use this specific model is it's flat unlike the Dell aw 3225 qf which with its curve would be unsuitable for my use case and it also had slightly more height on offer from the stand which I prefer over the Asus PG 32 ucdm so of the three models I basically chose the best for my use case but realistically I probably could have used the Asus model as well as part of this burn in test the 321 urx is allowed to run any and all old Le care features on the monitor side so long as I don't find them annoying during use I started by enabling every single olded care feature setting in the OSD with any sliders set to maximum protection and then worked my way back disabling and turning down options if they annoyed me after a month of use I've currently settled on the following configuration I've got pixel shift on normal which is only mildly distracting when it happens in fact I often don't notice so this was an easy setting to keep on and normal is the default I've got static screen detection set to the absolute maximum protection mode I don't find the dimming annoying as anytime I go to use the monitor it returns to normal brightness I've also got multi logo detection on the minimum level which drops brightness a bit though I re-calibrated it to 200 nits after enabling the feature so no cheating there as for taskbar and Boundary detection I found that after about a 100 hours of use that these were causing a few issues taskbar detection created a noticeable vignette along the bottom edge of the monitor in several configurations I was using such as using two side by-side browser windows so I opted to disable it boundary detection was causing similar vignetting along any edges it was noticing with a significant contrast change so for example if I had an app snapped to the left half of the display and I had a dark wallpaper behind it part of the bright app window would be dimmed along the border with the darker wallpaper that annoyed me so I disabled it with that configuration and allowing the monitor to run its compensation Cycles as normal after about 250 hours of heavy static content use I've experienced no burning or brightness change that's pretty much as I expected but it's still good to confirm the monitor will not be destroyed after just a few hundred hours which is well short of the 3-year burin warranty period let alone an acceptable lifespan for a $1,000 monitor I've looked at multiple full screen patterns including various Grays and various colors and there's not even a hint of burning yet it's basically as new it'll be very interesting to see how many more months until Burnin is faintly noticeable and then how many more until the monitor is affected in day-to-day usage through noticeable burning you'll have to keep an eye on this video series to find out at least based on my usage patterns what I do want to do though is provide some additional thoughts on using this MSI QD OED as a productivity monitor over the last month and I think these thoughts will also apply to other monitors using the same panel firstly text quality as I mentioned in the review text quality is excellent on these 4K cids with their 140 PPI pixel density and this is still the case after hundreds of hours of use it isn't a situation where I just didn't notice the lower text quality to begin with I can safely say that this is a complete non-issue for me text quality is very acceptable and in most cases I completely forgot the sub pixel structure is different even though I use it beside 2 32in 4K IPS LCDs that use a traditional RGB stripe the screen coding is proving slightly problematic as I use the display during the day with either sunlight or overhead office lights so the ambient light reflectivity is noticeable it's nice to get the grainfree clarity of a glossy panel but if I want to open a nearby window to get some sunlight if this sun is in the wrong position the amount of Reflections is so bad it's almost unusable whereas the previous LG LCD monitor that I was using with the matte anti- glare coating fared much better with that said when I shade the monitor from direct sunlight mirrorlike Reflections have been negligible pretty much a non-issue the 240 HZ refresh rate at 4K is much better than I was expecting for productivity work relative to the 144 HZ LCD I was using the combination of a higher refresh rate and faster response times makes this Q all much nicer to use for everyday tasks especially when browsing the web and scrolling through text the speed and refresh rate combination is definitely noticeable and provides a smoother clearer experience so it's not just gaming where you'll benefit from a 240 HZ refresh rate as my other two 4K monitors are still 144 HZ LCDs I'm getting a taste of the differences on a daily basis and without a doubt I prefer to use the main QD OED for web browsing and most primary productivity work the MSI 3 urx in particular has a few annoying issues with how it runs the pixel refresh compensation cycle the default behavior is popping up with a message every 4 hours which comes with several options for Action you can either run the pixel refresh immediately which puts the monitor into standby and means I can't do any work on it while it runs or set a reminder for either 4 or 16 hours later if you choose the reminder option or just ignore the message until it goes away the display will automatically run the compensation cycle the next time the monitor enter standby these messages would pop up right in the middle of work every 4 hours as I was typically using the display for more than 4 hours at a time it got to the point of being annoying so I changed it to only display a message after 16 hours since then it's been a lot less annoying the exception being though that the 321 urx after running the compensation cycle in standby always turns the monitor off rather than returning to standby so if I turn my PC back on for work the next day the monitor doesn't automatically wake up and I have to physically turn it on using the button it would be much better if the pixel refresh feature in standby put the monitor back into standby once it was done so it would then wake up automatically just a small thing that's a bit frustrating aside from this I've generally had a great time using the 321 urx as a productivity monitor it has great color quality it's accurate it's fast decent resolution packs a high refresh rate even though some of these features are more geared towards gaming it also makes for a General use monitor provided it doesn't start burning in anytime soon with that said I don't think any particular aspect to this 4K QD OED has been revolutionary for my workflow yes it's smoother and clearer to use at times and the viewing angles are great but for me it's mostly been a similar experience to using a 4K LCD of the same size the significant benefits from a product like this such as deep blacks and great HDR performance just don't impact my usage very much and HDR in particular I don't use at all as I'm sticking with the SDR mode for productivity apps that's not a big issue though because the point of this exercise is to assess Burnin over a long period of time and see whether QD OLED is suitable for mixed workloads if you want an OLED for a bit of gaming but you use your monitor 70 to 80% of the time for desktop apps figuring out whether it plays nicely for productivity over several months and whether that type of usage leads to burning is important anyway you'll see regular updates about burning right here on monitors unboxed so subscribe to get that content in your inbox also I'm interested to hear your predictions on how long it will take for me to burn in my QD OED monitor on purpose based on the usage description I've given leave them in the comments below and I guess you'll get bragging rights if you're right anyway that's it for this video as I mentioned please do subscribe to the channel to get all these Burnin updates in your feed as they come in also if you want to support our Channel directly we have our patreon and Flo plan accounts links are in the description below it's a great way to support the channel directly and if it turns out I need to buy another qdl Le monitor to replace this one once it burns in then the best way to do that and help us out to buy things like that is to support us on patreon of float plane so thanks for watching and I'll catch you in the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: Monitors Unboxed

Views: 157,319

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Id: ShRbArSGq1U

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 21 2024