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Comment by Sloppy | Hacker News Reader

This report doesn't seem to mention burn-in directly. This is IMHO the achilles heel of the current crop of OLED TVs. This is a very hidden fact. Everyone talks about how great they are and say they're the hands-down winner among popular TVs but after having owned one for 2 years it displayed horrible burn-in. They are fantastic while they last then they are awful. It would be nice to know how mLeds, uLeds, and the new tech sizes up for burn-in.

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Seriously it is not. I have a LG C9 and bought it after recommendation from friends who game on theirs. If you are going to leave it on the same screen all day long there are better choices, like having it on a new station that has a permanent ticker or channels which insist on a permanent logo.

You have to go out of your way to force burn in, there has been some good 3rd party testing [0]

Oh, as for the TV, the colors are astounding and its thinness is just a bit on the silly side, seriously from one third on up from the base it is as thick as iPad

I expect micro LED to over take it one day but for now if you are a movie aficionado there is no subsistute, this is especially true when dealing with letter boxed movies as there is no bleed into the black borders

[0] https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test

C9 is still pretty new, isn’t it? My C6 burn in is awful.

I use my B6 for watching TV (streaming) and for gaming. I have absolutely no burn-in of any kind. Also see: https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test

I have a C7 and after running it maybe 4-5 hours / day average I haven't seen burn-in. If anything, not watching cable news is an improvement to our lives and when I eventually upgrade I can use it for gaming and not mind that the burn-in is happening for anything remotely serious. LG's input and panel latency with OLED is quite an exception and is one reason I paid for such a panel.

Another C7 user here checking in, had it for almost 3 years now - about 5hrs/day of mixed use TV/movies and it's still awesome.

No sign of burn-in and I check it with color slides every few months. I think the C6 panels were much more prone to burn in than C7.

Some people with C7 panels had problems with a bug where the automatic compensation program does not run which greatly accelerates burn in, but I believe LG is replacing TVs for people who get that.

My C7 looks absolutely stunning with good sources 4k/HDR.

I'm happy with my purchase every day and would never think about going back to crappy LCD.

I have a C9. Best television I’ve ever owned. I’ll be heartbroken if it suffers burn-in in a couple of years.

You need to distinguish between burn-in and image retention. Are you seeing burn-in or just image retention?

Burn-in: When you have an image that stays even long after you've switched (e.g., the news channel logo is permanently stuck in the corner).

Image retention: When a static image is briefly retained when you switch the image to a mostly-even color (e.g., a logo stays after you switch to a mostly-gray background, but fades over a period of minutes/hours).

I've seen image retention on my 55EG9100 (even older than another post's 'burned in' C6), but I've never seen burn-in. And I played lots and lots of video games that has static HUDs.

Ostensibly the newer OLED panels have even less image retention problems than the older ones. I've never noticed even image retention on my newer C8 OLED.

Wasn't the problem with OLEDs simply breakdown? They lose some percentage of their brightness and color depth every year until they look old and washed out? And the worst part is each color degrades at a different rate so the color balance gets wonky as the panel ages.

OLED aging is one of the primary reasons that burn-in is a thing. There's a ton of algorithms to try to normalize this so as the panel ages that it just uniformly dims, and you don't get hot spots (or cold spots). I don't think it's complex enough to handle stuff like the news logos though. Generally speaking it's assumed that the pixels are all exercised somewhat uniformly I think.

Whether burn-in is still an issue depends very heavily on how you use the OLED TV. I have my OLED TV for almost three years and no burn-in. I know there are tests that show that you can provoke burn-in, but that is with rather extreme scenarios. If you don't have static elements on for hours at a time, you generally shouldn't have an issue. One thing I've heard, but that doesn't apply to my usage is that e.g. putting on TV stations with static chyrons in bold colors can lead to burn-in.

I first noticed the yellow button from the youtube app burnt in (after about three years). Then it was a smear of green in the middle probably from all the yellow highlighting of objects in the witcher(Xbox game). Also some lines from subtitles are starting to show, and lately I’ve been able to read Netflix written in the lower right corner.

It seems there are some ui-patterns involved that could perhaps, at least for the webos apps, be avoided through interface standards.

Here is one of those tests:

https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/real-life-oled-burn-in-test

Is it extreme? Sure, but it's not contrived--five hours on, one hour off. If the TV in the office break room was an OLED, it would absolutely exhibit this level of burn in.

> This is a very hidden fact

Burn-in risks crop up in every online conversation about OLEDs, at least since LG's 2006 line was released.

How do you use your OLED TV? As a computer monitor, or for some other similarly static image?

Is OLED burn in worse or better than Plasma?

Same as on a B/W CRT.

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