Guspaz wrote:OLED burn-in is cumulative, so it's going to happen to every OLED screen eventually. But the question is, will it happen to a problematic degree within the normal service life of a screen, and for the vast majority of people, no, it won't.
That said, I'm not sure why they haven't implemented burn-in correction by tracking the wear on individual subpixels. OLED subpixels have a predictable and consistent lifespan, they decrease in brightness in a predictable manner based on how much light they've pumped out. So why not track the total light output of each subpixel, so that you can correct for burn-in by reducing the brightness of the rest of the screen to compensate, or by increasing the brightness of the burnt-in subpixels?
It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do, maybe a 128-bit accumulator for every subpixel, and you take the current brightness of every subpixel, apply some weighting based on a curve, and add it up. Then you've got this convenient map of the effective brightness of the subpixels to do any corrections/compensations.
IIRC, LG OLEDs have four subpixels per pixel, so one gigabyte of flash storage and one gigabyte of RAM would be enough to track it. Plus the hardware to accumulate the data, but they're custom-designing the video chips in these things, they could add dedicated hardware to do it.
All burn-in is cumulative by it's nature. There is no evidence that the issue is worse with Oled than Plasma though.
Oled and Plasma displays don't actually burn an image into the glass like old CRTs did. The issue is really the fading of pixels over time. Nobody has yet invented the eternal light source. They all fade over time. If you leave a bright static logo on-screen for extended periods, those phosphors will fade faster and burn in.
While it's probably true to say Oleds won't last forever, that is equally true of all display tech. An LCD screen has a backlight which will also dull over time. They have a typical lifespan of around 20,000 hours. For obvious reasons, we don't have any useful data on average Oled life-span yet so we can only guess.
Given the pace of change currently, I think a lot of our TV's will become obsolete long before they are ready for the scrap heap. When Oleds first came out and cost $15,000 or $20,000, I might have worried more about the gamble on new tech. Now, 4-5 years in, a 55" Oled can be had new for less than $1000. It's not the nail-biter it once was. Any risk is well worth it for that delicious image quality.
plus, these new lG Oleds have all manner of burn-in prevention features built in. They tell you to leave it in standby because it runs various bits of software while you sleep to keep those pixels looking fresh. And, it has a user-selectable pixel refresher program.