OLED monitors are the hot ticket for PC upgrades, both on the gaming and standard productivity sides. But if you were around when OLED panels were starting to spread in TVs and smartphones, you might be a little worried about burn-in. One YouTuber’s long-term testing shows that, at least for some of the more recent designs, you shouldn’t be.
We checked out the burn-in torture test from Monitors Unboxed back in February, when a year of brutal use for thousands of hours showed visible, but minimal burn-in for a 4K OLED panel. After extending the same worst-case scenario test to 18 months and over 4000 hours of side-by-side productivity tasks, the testing also shows a persistent, dark taskbar, as is probably the standard for most Windows 11 users.
Watching the results on my own OLED monitor, which has gone through about eight months of primary work and gaming conditions, the burn-in in the video is definitely visible, but only when specifically looking for it in all-dark or all-light tests. It’s nothing so distracting as, say, the burned-in panel on my grandmother’s LG OLED TV from watching years of constant cable news. On that one you could see the text ticker and dark area for the talking head.
With a similar torture test for a more modern panel, designed to be used for desktop computing, I think the results are barely even notable. It is considerably worse than what you’d get from an LCD panel, even a high-quality one in the same price range as a 4K OLED monitor. But it’s not something that would prevent me from buying an OLED, especially if I planned on using one for gaming or media.
That said, Monitors Unboxed did start to notice the burn-in on some dark-hued apps and in video for the first time. So it’s something to be aware of if you plan to use an OLED for productivity tasks, and if you do, be sure to run those cleaning cycles. I’ll also point out that most gaming OLED monitors now come with extended warranty protection for burn-in.