Comment by wheresmyusern | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wheresmyusern | Hacker News Reader

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what is the cause of burn in? is this a fundamental problem with oleds or will it go away with as the technology matures? thats what i really want to know because oled is next in line for dominance in display technology and that would suck if it came with burn in.

off the top of my head, i would say that the burn in is caused by degradation of one of the color elements in the leds. the blue elements were a problem for a long time -- they would degrade very quickly. i would guess that the blue elements of this display begin to lose their integrity much faster than the other elements, so if you leave those blue elements on for a long period of time you will cause those elements to go bad and then from then on you have a pattern of burned out blue elements, causing burn in. so if this is true, apps that are meant to display bright static images for long periods of time could do everything in shades of red and green, leaving the blue elements off completely.

this will also hopefully mean that all the cool screen savers from the 90s will be given new life, and maybe we can even have a new renaissance of screen savers

It does a appear to be a fundamental problem with OLED displays. AFAIK, every OLED screen ever made has burn-in issues, and every manufacturer of OLED screens takes care to explicitly exclude display burn-in from the warranty terms.

I made the mistake of buying an OLED TV to use as a computer monitor last year, and today there are multiple areas of the screen where burn-in marks are visible from things like the taskbar, window title bars, window separators from tiled arrangement, etc.

It's a real shame because OLED has otherwise terrific properties as a display technology, and looks downright mind-blowing in a dark room where the infinite contrast from the lack of a backlight shines through. But because of the burn-in issues I've experienced, I can't in good faith recommend it as a long-term investment for use cases where you're likely to have static images on the screen for prolonged periods of time (smartphone and computer displays).

Anyone aware of other promising display technologies that can achieve the same levels of contrast without the downsides of the burn-in risks associated with OLED?

That's a great point, and I'm glad my HTPC screen was a Samsung SUHD over an LG OLED now. The Samsung's uniformity and edge bleed isn't great but I think I'd take that over the permanent burn in I'd inevitably get from eg Win10' screensaver not kicking in.

I noticed the burn in on my button bar of my Samsung S8, and finally understood why they didn't let me have a fully black navbar. I had installed a custom Navbar app to make it black; now that area is lighter than the rest.. fortunately not too be yet, but I'll be careful about apps like Google Auto going forward.

Based on the photographs of screens that I have seen, this seems to be true image persistence, meaning that e.g. a blue subpixel being left on for a long time will not immediately turn completely off when instructed to. That’s the only explanation I can think of for photographs I’ve seen of color images remaining (with the same colors, just fainter) after the screen was instructed to switch to solid grey or black.

If my impression is correct, it must be a different phenomenon than the one you’re describing (which I’ve also always heard stttributed to OLEDs), where subpixels will output less light over their lifetimes (and perhaps the dimming-over-time curve is different for different colors).

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