Over the course of the last month004 Archives we have been purposefully using a 4K OLED monitor in ways that will cause permanent burn-in. While most people strive to preserve the life of their brand-new and expensive monitors, we have decided to take one for the team and do the complete opposite. Our aim is to discover how much static application use it takes to see burn in, and we're determined to get there, it's just a question of how long.
What I've done is a simple swap of a 32" 4K IPS LCD for a 32" 4K QD-OLED in my workstation setup. No other changes. That means no dark mode, no screensavers, no hiding of the taskbar, no attempting to do things to prevent burn in. A simple LCD to OLED swap, using the OLED monitor in the exact same way as I was with the LCD. All the same bright white application windows and static toolbars with none (or close to none) dynamic content like video playback, and certainly no gaming.
I use my workstation daily for writing and video creation, so I'm frequently researching in web browsers, writing up scripts in Microsoft Office, editing videos in Premiere, creating thumbnails in Photoshop, and so on. Across these tasks there are crazy amounts of static stuff on screen, the Windows taskbar, toolbars in applications, icons, even just the general interface.
There's also dividers between apps when using side by side apps. All of these elements are at risk of creating permanent burn in on an OLED display, especially when using the bright and white "light mode" that Windows offers, which causes each pixel to run at a brighter level and has the potential for accelerating burn in relative to dark mode.
This is completely nothow you should be using an OLED monitor, even for productivity work. I would always recommend using dark mode, minimizing the taskbar, setting a black screensaver to activate after just a few minutes of inactivity, and looking to avoid static icons where possible to prevent those elements from burning in. But for this investigation I'm pretending that I don't know any of that, and have swapped out my LCD for OLED with no changes in usage... a worst case scenario.
