How to check an OLED screen for burn-in

Burn-in shows as a faint ghost of your taskbar or a game HUD on flat colors. Here’s how to find it, how to tell it from image retention and what helps.

By Hardware Detective editorial team · Last updated September 29, 2026 · How we test

OLED screens have no backlight. Every pixel makes its own light and pixels that spend more time lit wear slightly faster than the ones around them. Burn-in is what happens when that uneven wear becomes visible: a faint, permanent shape of something that sat on the screen for hundreds of hours.

It is easy to miss on normal content and obvious once you know where to look.

Where to look

Burn-in follows whatever stayed in the same place for a long time at high brightness. On a PC that usually means:

• the taskbar or dock along one edge
• desktop icons
• window title bars and browser tabs at the top
• a game’s health bar, minimap or ammo counter
• a news channel logo or ticker on a TV

Start with those areas. Burn-in in the middle of an otherwise moving picture is rare.

How to check

1. Let the screen warm up for ten minutes with ordinary content.
2. Open the dead pixel test and go full screen so nothing from the browser or desktop is visible.
3. Start with gray. Mid gray is the most revealing background because burn-in shows as a slightly darker or tinted shape and your eyes pick out small brightness differences best in the middle of the range.
4. Switch to red, green and blue in turn. OLED subpixels of each color wear at different rates, so a shape that is faint on gray can be clearer on one color. Blue and red subpixels often show wear first depending on the panel type.
5. Finish on white at your normal brightness.

Look from your normal seating position and then from closer. Burn-in doesn’t change with viewing angle the way LCD backlight bleed or IPS glow does. It sits in exactly the same place on every color.

If you’re not sure whether you’re seeing a shape or imagining one, take a photo on the gray screen with the camera exposure locked. Shapes that show up in the photo are real.

Burn-in or image retention?

A faint shape straight after a long session isn’t necessarily permanent. Image retention is a temporary effect where recently static content leaves a trace that fades on its own.

To tell them apart:

1. Turn the screen off with its normal power button and leave it plugged in. Most OLED monitors and TVs run a short compensation cycle in standby.
2. Come back after the time the manual gives for that cycle, often a few minutes.
3. Check the gray screen again.

If the shape has gone, it was retention. If it’s still there after a day of normal use and several standby cycles, treat it as burn-in.

Reducing wear from now on

Most of the protection is built in. Your job is mainly not to switch it off.

• Leave the screen plugged in when it’s off. Cutting power at the wall stops the standby compensation cycles from running.
• Keep pixel shift on. It moves the whole picture by a pixel or two over time so static edges don’t land on the same pixels constantly.
• Hide static elements. Auto-hide the taskbar, use a dark theme and let the screen turn off after a few minutes idle rather than showing a static desktop.
• Lower desktop brightness. Wear increases with brightness. Keep the high brightness modes for HDR films and games.
• Vary what’s on screen. A game HUD for a few hours a day is fine. The same HUD twelve hours a day for months is the pattern behind most burn-in.

Checking a used OLED

Burn-in matters most when you buy second hand, since you can’t see how the screen was used. Ask the seller to show a full screen gray image before you pay and look at the taskbar area and the top edge first. The used hardware checklist covers the rest of what to check.

What burn-in isn’t

• A single dot that stays black or colored is a dead or stuck pixel, not burn-in.
• Faint vertical bands on dark gray are usually a uniformity issue from manufacture. They’re present from day one, which is why a check on a new screen is worth doing.
• Dark corners on an OLED are uncommon but can be a uniformity problem too. They don’t match the shape of anything you display.