Some iPhone 15 Pro Max users are reporting OLED screen 'burn in'
techradar.com
techradar.com
I finally made the move from my 11 to OLED with my 15 Pro Max, and man am I disappointed with the screen. Apparently I’m sensitive to PWM flicker, and at lower brightness it’s very distracting and tiring on my eyes. I don’t know if this is an OLED limitation, or just this particular kind of panel, but it’s not something I’ve noticed with LED displays.
OLED has always felt like a stopgap on the way to other tech like micro LED, which hopefully doesn’t have the same kinds of drawbacks like burn in and PWM flicker.
Most people only notice flicker during saccades. A larger proportion of people will notice scrolling purple/blue smear, that manifests itself at extremely low source current, when you have really dark shades of grey on a dimmed screen in low brightness environments.
As an aside, burn-in and mura seem to be solved problem these days, due to display driver ICs constantly characterizing the I-V curve of individual subpixels and applying compensation using aging models. Variabilities introduced during manufacturing are also optically captured for compensation.
Additionally, there exists compensation circuits within the TFT plane for fine-adjustement of uniformity for each subpixel.
MicroLEDs are not magically immune to the issues affecting OLED. https://www.oled-info.com/measuring-and-correcting-microled-...
In what alternate reality would I want to turn my screen orange just to not have it flicker annoyingly at non-full brightness levels?
The burn is most noticeable in dark rooms with reduced white point at a low setting (so, the dimmest it can get). The pictures I’ve seen look like a similar setup.
I’ve used my 13 Pro like this for years before going to bed.. it also had some burn in but it took a longer time to develop.
Burn-in is permanent and visible at high brightness, and also extremely unlikely as panels have had built-in algorithms to avoid it for the past decade.
edit: made it snarky without considering the reply's full meaning, I'd like to retract the snark, but I leave this in so the author's reply makes sense.
My system developed the problem, I was about 2 years out of the warranty, and by the time I heard of the double-secret recall, it had ended.
They didn't even provide for all the machines affected, just a subset of models.
An apple store rep or genius will lie to your face that there's nothing they can do about a particular issue, but come back and ask a different employee with the magic words for the secret recall and it gets taken care of.
It's fucking bullshit. Apple is rolling in piles of cash and they pull this shit to pinch a few pennies here and there.
I've honestly had much better customer service experiences with just about any other OEM.
LCD retention is never permanent and goes away on its own.
I find it hard to believe anyone is getting burn in on a device that hasn't even been in consumers hands for a month yet. I'm sure it is possible but even the cheapest OLED panels take time to get burn in.
My comment was more that I've not had any of the issues I've seen reported over the past few days. No overheating. No screen issues. No battery life issues.
I'm not saying they don't exist of course. I was just adding my personal experience to add balance.
I will add that while the upgrade from my Xs Max is obviously pretty big it is still iOS at the end of the day and it isn't actually any different in general. It does a few new things like the Always On Display but overall it is the same as my Xs Max just faster/smoother. Naturally the camera upgrades are very impressive as is the Pro Motion screen. My Xs Max had a battery replacement 9 months ago so it still had good battery life but the 15 is clearly much better. Even with the always on display it loses around 1% battery every 4-5 hours which is what I would expect. My Xs Max would also lose around 1% every 4-5 hours even without that feature.
Naturally I am interested in hearing about these issue as it alerts me to keep an eye out for such issues developing for myself, but as with anything reported on places like Twitter I take it with a grain of salt as it could just be someone deliberately damaging their device to drive engagement and grow their presence sadly.
Aren't all of these screens made by the same few manufacturers? Why does Apple have these issues? Is it software/driver related?
I’d say the firmware has precautions against this problem. Could it be only a small number of phones with defective panels presenting this problems and people blowing it out of proportion?
On a more serious note, is this due to large media exposure or is there something out of the ordinary here? OLED is not new and big companies like Samsung have been the "canary" for this.
A real disaster could happen if it strikes 1 year later. On Samsung's case of battery fire, not only they had to do a recall but they had to collect the devices in special containers and the dangers of their product was advertised on planes for years to come. Yet, Samsung recovered gracefully.