The best TVs, the best phones and one of the best game consoles, the Nintendo Switch OLED, have one thing in common: They have OLED screens. OLED, or organic light-emitting diode, screens offer performance traditional LCD just can’t match. They have incredible contrast ratios that make the image look much more lifelike. It’s why companies like LG, Sony, and now Samsung have OLED at the top of their TV model lines. The same is true for Apple, Samsung, Google and others on the phone side. OLED screens offer the best picture quality currently available. Unfortunately, there is one, big potential downside: burn-in.
Burn-in is when when part of an image — navigation buttons or persistent icons on a phone, for example, or a channel logo, news ticker or a scoreboard on a TV — remains visible as a ghostly background no matter what else appears onscreen. Apple’s support page for the OLED screen iPhones touts that they’ve been designed to reduce the effects of OLED burn-in, even as it acknowledges that burn-in can occur in “extreme cases.” Google’s Pixel phone support page says burn-in can happen “when the same image stays on your screen for a long time at a high brightness” and recommends steps to reduce it.
In the TV world, LG has a page that says “It is rare for an average TV consumer to create an environment that could result in burn-in.” Nonetheless, stories of OLED burn-in don’t seem rare online, with owners on YouTube, forums and social media reporting the issue. Reviews site RTings has also demonstrated burn-in with long-term tests (more on that below).
The fact is that all organic light-emitting diode screens can experience burn-in, and from everything we know, they’re more susceptible than standard liquid crystal displays (LCDs), which at the moment is every mainstream TV that’s not OLED.
So if the mere possibility of burn-in is your primary concern, the decision is simple: Buy an LCD-based display instead. But know that…
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