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Comment by hakunin | Hacker News Reader

Everything I recently researched about display technologies, mini LED has no image retention/burn-in issues, and renders fonts better compared to OLED. It seems you want OLED for media (and mobile, since you often alternate entire screens), IPS for work, and mini LED as a more expensive compromise without burn-in, that does text as well as IPS, and media almost as well as OLED. I wonder why would they even want to use OLED on work screens with lots of static content, did something major change about the tech such that it doesn't suffer these issues anymore?

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I think OLED burn in has been mitigated fairly well recently. At least, I have a Linux laptop from 2021 that I use for work as well as fun, no particular care taken to avoid it, but no burn-in so far.

Font rendering, hard to say, I think it’s just preference.

Terminals look very nice with actual-black backgrounds.

I have a Samsung QD-OLED monitor from 2023 which has very noticeable burn-in at low brightness levels. This is from the era of "OLED burn-in has been solved," and it's soured me on OLED monitors since I do photography as a hobby and don't want burn-in affecting how I see images on my screen. I think it's fine for televisions, but I don't like it for PC use where I have static windows on my screen for a long time. I even used dark mode and still got burn-in pretty quickly, for example where it draws the border between side-by-side windows (so, a vertical line down the middle of my screen). Once I noticed that, I started resizing my side-by-side windows so their border isn't in the same place every day, but the damage is done.

Comments like yours make me feel justified that potential burn-in issues were why I stuck with an IPS panel when I purchased a new monitor earlier this year.

My past monitors have lasted me 5-7 years in the past, and I only upgraded for size (once) and gsync (also once).

I don't want to be forced to buy another one just because of burn-in.

Interesting. Since I use the pretty barebones Linux config (i3wm) and haven’t tried to avoid static elements, I have a lot on my screen. But, I tend to keep my screen fairly dark just for comfort. It is also 1080p, and not super high dpi, I wonder if bigger pixels are less fragile.

Mac hasn't used subpixel rendering for fonts since Mojave and has never used it on iOS so there's no difference to font rendering on Apple platforms.

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