Forget Burn-In, Edge Rot Is Eating Pixels On Some WOLED TVs
Earlier generation WOLED panels appear to be suffering from "edge rot" after about 18,000 hours of run time, which is the equivalent of ten years of daily use in a “typical US household.” As the name implies it appears on the edge of the display and can manifest as either a singular dead pixel or a cluster of dead pixels, “which is reminiscent of mold on a wall.”
QD-OLED panels fared much better during this set of testing with none of the TVs exhibiting signs of edge rot, although it doesn’t mean owners of these types of TVs are out of the woods. Rtings notes that it has only managed to test a total of three units so far, and that because it’s a newer display technology its “long-term track record remains more limited.”
OLED monitors, which have become an increasingly popular option with PC gamers, are hopefully as immune as the QD-OLED TVs that were tested. There are just too few samples to draw any real conclusions, but at least for the monitors Rtings had on hand, there didn’t appear to be any edge rot popping up.
Unfortunately, unlike with burn-in, there isn’t much that OLED owners can do to avoid having their display get hit with edge rot. Industry experts shared that “this may be caused by contamination during manufacturing, defects in the encapsulation of some OLED displays, or degradation of that encapsulation over time,” making it a panel lottery type of situation.
Of course, it’s unlikely someone will run these TV as hard as Rtings did with its testing, so most users likely won’t encounter edge rot for many years, if at all.
