Is Burn-In Still A Concern For OLED? This 18-Month QD-OLED Stress Test Sheds Some Light

Eighteen months into a deliberate QD-OLED burn-in test, Hardware Unboxed (through their secondary Monitors Unboxed channel) has returned with an update on the MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED's burn-in. The deliberate burn-in test encompasses 8 hours a day, every day, of mostly-static content creation usage, especially with half-split screen apps and an always-present bottom taskbar. Previous videos were uploaded at 1 month, then after 3 months, then once every three months, culminating in this latest update. After all of this time, how noticeable has the burn-in become, and how disruptive is it to the experience?

The most compelling visual to discuss is the burn-in seen after 18 months. The most noticeable area where burn-in occurred is a line going straight down the middle of the screen, since the tester preferred to work with either two windows snapped to each half of the screen, or with one window snapped to the right side of the screen when only one application was in use. Not only did this produce a pronounced line in the middle, it also resulted in the right side of the screen getting degraded faster, and the right side being noticeably darker than the left. This is a major uniformity issue, and has become a lot more noticeable to the tester over the past three months.


As the tester says, burn-in has began to actually effect his use of the monitor over the past three months. The taskbar being burnt-in hardly matters at all, but the burn-in effectively creating a permanent split in the middle of the screen is noticeable, especially when doing more in-depth video editing work and wrangling with two halves of the screen having a noticeably different brightness. After all, the primary benefits of OLED are super-high contrast and great color reproduction — but when half the screen is consistently dimmer than the other and the green subpixels have burnt out the fastest, those benefits are mostly negated.


That said, the worst of the burn-in isn't immediately noticeable viewed from a camera, at a distance. You'd really have to be in person to notice most of these issues without image enhancement, and likely be close to the screen outside of high-contrast scenes that would more strongly exacerbate the burn-in issues. This worst-case scenario does show that it still takes a fair amount of time for a modern QD-OLED screen to have noticeable burn-in. With the right mitigation tactics, especially keeping the monitor off when not in use, lowering brightness, and mixing workloads, you can effectively increase lifespan before burn-in starts or becomes noticeable. Eight hours of mostly-static content a day with little-if-any media consumption or gaming is certainly pushing it.

Credit: Hardware Unboxed