Are all TVs at risk from burn-in? Here's how to avoid the problem altogether

OLED screens run the biggest risk, but with a little common sense you can mitigate the issue.

If you're shopping for a new TV or monitor, you may have heard that OLED offers some of the best picture quality available today. While OLED TVs often cost a premium compared to budget and even mid-range LCDs, you get excellent contrast, vivid colors and deep blacks in return. However, there can be one major caveat to the display technology: the possibility of permanent image retention or burn-in.

While the term burn-in may sound alarming, especially if you're on the verge of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars, it's not something you need to worry about immediately. And even though it's inevitable, burn-in remains unnoticeable in many cases and takes years to appear even if it does. Better yet, you can take some simple precautions to significantly reduce the risk and extend the lifespan of an OLED display to keep burn-in at bay until it's time to upgrade.

So, what exactly is burn-in, what causes it on modern TVs and how can you minimize the risk? Here's a quick rundown.

An OLED display is made up of millions of tiny organic light-emitting diodes — hence the name OLED. This is unlike an LCD, which relies on a backlight to illuminate its pixels. This means that each pixel in an OLED generates its own light and can be dimmed or turned off independently. But while this granular control provides excellent contrast and deep blacks, it also means that individual pixels can wear out independently of each other.

Each time you use an OLED display, these individual pixels undergo some infinitesimal amount of degradation. In the real-world, this wear translates to a dimmer light output. To further complicate matters, each pixel is actually made up of several smaller sub-pixels that produce different colors, typically red, green and blue. These sub-pixels don't necessarily age at the same rate, either.

Practically speaking, the OLED display is continuously varying the brightness of each pixel and sub-pixel to reproduce the colors you see on the screen. Over time, though, this can cause some pixels can experience more wear than others and become dimmer. Eventually, the difference in brightness can become noticeable enough to our eyes.

Put simply, burn-in occurs when some pixels appear brighter than those that have experienced greater wear, creating a persistent outline or ghosting of previously displayed content.