OLED Burn-In Test

Check an OLED monitor, TV, or phone for burn-in with solid gray screens. Tell permanent burn-in from temporary image retention and see what pixel refresh does.

OLED screens are the best-looking displays you can buy and the only common ones that wear unevenly. A burn-in check takes a couple of minutes and needs nothing more than a few solid gray screens, which is why it belongs on your checklist before buying a used OLED, before a return window closes, and any time a faint ghost of your taskbar seems to be following you.

Open the gray test screens

How to run the test

Set brightness to around 50 percent and dim the room. Turn off any dynamic contrast, eco, or auto-brightness modes, and on a phone disable True Tone, Night Shift, or the Android equivalents.
Open the dead pixel test and pick the Gray 50% swatch. On a monitor or TV go full screen; on an iPhone the test fills the viewport (see the iPhone guide for the details).
Look for shapes, not dots. Burn-in shows up as the outline of something that used to be on screen: a Windows or macOS taskbar and dock, a channel logo, a news ticker, a game's minimap and health bar, or on a phone the keyboard and status bar. Stand back a metre or two, since a large faint shape is easier to see at a distance.
Switch to Gray 25% and Gray 75%. Dark gray reveals uneven brightness and vertical banding; light gray reveals colour tints, which appear because the red, green, and blue sub-pixels age at different rates so a worn region often looks slightly pink or green rather than just darker.
Check white and black too. Bright white at full screen shows the automatic brightness limiter working (the whole panel dims, which is normal) and exposes any large-area dimming. Pure black should be uniformly off on an OLED; any glow is something else.

If you see a ghost, do not decide yet. Read the next section first.

Burn-in vs image retention

The two look identical for the first few minutes, and the difference is entirely about whether it goes away.

Image retention is temporary. OLED pixels that have been driven hard for a while take a short time to return to their baseline, so a static element leaves a ghost that fades over seconds to minutes once the content changes. It is more pronounced on warm panels and at high brightness. Every OLED does it to some degree, and it is not a defect.

Burn-in is permanent. The organic material in each sub-pixel dims as it accumulates hours at brightness, so a region that showed a bright static element for hundreds of hours ends up permanently a few percent dimmer than its surroundings. Nothing restores it; compensation cycles can only mask it.

To tell them apart: after spotting a ghost on gray, play varied full-screen content (a video, or just scroll a busy page) for ten minutes, then go back to Gray 50%. Gone means retention. Still there means burn-in, and the remaining question is how bad it is.

Pixel refresh and compensation cycles

OLED TVs and monitors run maintenance routines to keep wear even. A short cycle runs automatically after every few hours of use, when the display goes into standby; it takes a few minutes and you would normally never notice it. A long cycle, called Pixel Refresh, Pixel Cleaning, Panel Refresh, or similar depending on the brand, runs after hundreds or thousands of hours and takes an hour or so with the screen off. It measures each pixel's drift and adjusts the drive voltage to compensate, which makes mild uneven wear invisible again.

Two practical points follow. First, if your screen shows retention or early burn-in, let the short cycle run rather than interrupting it: leave the display in standby (not unplugged) for ten minutes after use. Second, do not run the long refresh manually more often than the manufacturer recommends. It works by ageing all pixels slightly to match the most worn ones, so running it repeatedly shortens the panel's life. On phones there is no user-facing refresh; the compensation happens continuously in the display driver.

Most OLEDs also run prevention features: pixel shift (the image moves by a pixel or two periodically), logo detection that dims static bright areas, and a screen saver after inactivity. Keep them on. On a desktop monitor, also auto-hide the taskbar and dock, use a dark theme, and avoid leaving a bright window at full brightness for hours.

What is normal and what is not

A good OLED on a solid gray is not perfectly uniform, and knowing what is normal saves a wasted return.

Slight vignetting, with the edges marginally darker than the centre, is normal on large panels.
Faint vertical banding on dark gray at low brightness is common and usually within specification. The same banding on mid-gray at normal brightness is worth a warranty conversation.
A subtle green or pink tint at very low brightness appears on many OLED phones and some monitors. It is a characteristic of how the panel is driven at the bottom of its range, not wear.
Automatic brightness limiting makes a full white screen dimmer than a small white box. This is deliberate and protects the panel.
A clearly recognisable shape that persists after ten minutes of varied content is burn-in. Whether it matters depends on whether you can see it in normal use; many mild cases are invisible outside of a gray test.
A bright or dark dot is a pixel defect, not burn-in. Use the coloured screens in the dead pixel test to classify it as dead, stuck, or hot.

On an LCD, uniformity problems look different: a lighter blotch on black is backlight bleed or a pressure mark, and a mottled look on gray is the "dirty screen effect" of an uneven backlight diffuser. Neither is burn-in, and neither is fixable, but both are judged against the manufacturer's uniformity tolerance rather than any burn-in policy.

Warranty and buying used

Burn-in cover differs widely. Several monitor manufacturers now include it in a two- or three-year warranty, and a few TV brands cover it for a period; others explicitly list burn-in as excluded wear. Check the warranty text for the exact model. If you are inside a retailer's return window, the gray test is the thing to run on the first day.

When buying a used OLED, run the gray screens before paying. A used TV with a faint news-channel logo or a used monitor with a ghosted taskbar has spent a long time on static content, and burn-in only gets worse. Also take a look at the panel's usage hours if the service menu exposes them, and combine the check with the dead pixel test and, on a phone or touch display, the touch screen test, since a screen that has had a hard life often has more than one problem.

Frequently asked questions

How do I test an OLED screen for burn-in?

Show a solid mid-gray screen at moderate brightness and look for shapes: a taskbar, logo, keyboard, or HUD ghosted into the panel. Then check a dark gray and a light gray, because different levels reveal different faults. The gray swatches in the dead pixel test are set up for exactly this.

What is the difference between burn-in and image retention?

Image retention is temporary: the ghost fades within seconds to minutes once the screen shows something else. Burn-in is permanent: the sub-pixels in that region have aged more than their neighbours and will always be a little dimmer. If a ghost is still visible after ten minutes of varied content, it is burn-in.

Can burn-in be fixed?

No. Burn-in is physical wear of the OLED material and nothing restores it. The pixel refresh or compensation cycles built into OLED TVs and monitors measure the wear and adjust drive levels to even it out visually, which can make mild burn-in far less noticeable, but the underlying wear remains.

Is burn-in covered by warranty?

It varies. Some monitor manufacturers now include burn-in in a two- or three-year warranty as a selling point; many TV makers exclude it as normal wear. Check the warranty document for the exact model rather than the brand in general.

Do LCD screens get burn-in?

Not true burn-in, but LCDs can show temporary image retention where liquid crystals have held one state for a long time, and in rare cases a persistent ghost on older panels. It clears with varied content far more readily than OLED wear. What people see on LCDs is more often backlight non-uniformity.

Do modern OLED monitors still burn in?

Yes, but much more slowly than early panels. Pixel shift, logo dimming, automatic brightness limiting, and refresh cycles mean typical mixed use is unlikely to produce visible burn-in for years. Static content at high brightness for many hours a day remains the risk.

What brightness should I use for the test?

Around 50 percent, in a dim room. At maximum brightness, the automatic brightness limiter on many OLEDs changes the picture and can hide or exaggerate faults; at very low brightness, most panels show some banding and tint that is not a defect.

Last updated 2026-09-16. Everything on this page runs in your browser. Nothing you type or upload leaves your device.