OLED Burn-in Test
Step your screen through the slides that make burn-in visible: near-black grays where a ghosted logo shows first, solid colors that expose uneven subpixel wear, and gradients for the banding people mistake for damage.
Burn-in, retention or banding?
Image retention is temporary. A static logo, a game HUD or a bright window can leave a faint copy of itself behind for minutes or hours, and it fades once the panel shows something else.
Burn-in is permanent. Pixels that displayed the same bright shape for hundreds of hours have aged faster than their neighbours, so they give less light for the same signal. Nothing shown on the screen puts that back.
Banding is neither. Wide steps or faint stripes on the gradient slides come from the panel rounding colors it cannot show exactly. If the pattern follows the gradient, it is banding, not damage.
How to run it
- Darken the room. Reflections and daylight hide the faint marks you are looking for.
- Turn the brightness up to maximum and switch off automatic or ambient brightness, which quietly changes the picture while you compare slides.
- Start the test and take each slide slowly. Scan the whole panel, corners included, and note anything that keeps its shape and position from one slide to the next.
- Press Esc when you are done to read what the marks mean.
What the slides do
The deck runs from the darkest slides to the brightest and finishes with two patterns. The low grays do most of the work: a faintly aged patch is invisible on a bright picture and obvious against a near-black field. Each slide carries a caption on screen telling you what it is good for.
The screen goes black on its own
A still image left up for hours is exactly what causes burn-in, so this test refuses to be one. After three minutes without input the stage turns black, and a tap or a key brings the slide straight back.
If the mark you found looks like mild retention rather than permanent burn-in, a slow full-screen color cycle is the usual next thing to try, and it costs nothing but time.
Run burn-in conditioning on mild retentionFrequently asked questions
What is the difference between burn-in and image retention?
Retention is temporary and clears once the screen shows something else; burn-in is permanent uneven ageing of the pixels themselves. The same mark can be either, so repeat this test after a day of ordinary use. Whatever has gone was retention.
Can an LCD get burn-in?
Real burn-in is an OLED and plasma problem, because those pixels make their own light and age with use. An LCD can show temporary image persistence, and it has faults of its own that look similar on these slides: backlight bleed, IPS glow and clouding, all of which come from the backlight rather than the pixels.
Why maximum brightness in a dark room?
The differences you are hunting are a few percent of brightness. Room light reflecting off the panel swamps them, and a dimmed screen flattens the dark grays where ghosting shows best.
Can burn-in be fixed?
Permanent burn-in cannot be reversed by anything shown on the screen, here or anywhere else. Mild retention often fades by itself, and a slow color cycle can help it along. OLED TVs also run their own compensation cycle from the picture settings menu, which is the closest thing to a real fix and is built into the set.