OLED monitors have many benefits, like their exceptional color accuracy, wide viewing angles, and deep blacks. However, one of the main concerns for buyers of OLED displays is burn-in. Burn-in occurs when a static image is displayed on the screen for an extended period of time, causing the pixels to degrade and leave a permanent ghost image on the screen. This can be especially problematic for gamers or professionals who use the same applications or have static content on the screen for long periods.
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There are several factors that can contribute to OLED burn-in, including high brightness, high contrast, and displaying the same image for an extended period of time. It's important to note that burn-in is not a manufacturing defect of an individual panel, but rather the result of how the display is used.
If you'd like to prevent burn-in, there are some practices you can keep in mind during use, as well as some tools that can help against it. Here are some tips to mitigate it:
- Avoid constantly running the display at its maximum brightness level. You can either lower the brightness manually when displaying static content or, if it’s offered in your monitor, enable a built-in feature that automatically dims the monitor when it’s been to long at a high brightness.
- Use a screensaver, or set your monitor to go to sleep after a few minutes without use. This will ensure you don’t leave your monitor on a static page for too long when you get up, and will help prevent accidental burn-in when you forget to turn it off. You can set your computer to first go to a screensaver, and go to sleep after a few minutes, but make sure the screensaver has movement and does not have any static elements.
- Set UI elements in your OS and software to hide when not selected, as they are constantly on your screen and are usually the first to burn-in. You can also set them to darker colors.
- Use a dark wallpaper, and set it to change automatically. Since the wallpaper is always visible when you aren’t using apps in full screen, it is very likely to burn-in quickly. You can prevent this by using a dark, or even black wallpaper and setting it to change automatically every few minutes.
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Some monitor manufacturers implement burn-in prevention tools on the monitor itself, which shift the image on the screen every few minutes to prevent a static image from remaining in the same place for too long, or may reduce the brightness of the display gradually over extended use. This is the case with monitors like the Dough Spectrum, which greatly reduces the risk of burn-in for all but the most extreme cases, and we’d highly recommend using them to get the best durability for your monitor.
It’s important to always be aware of the content on your screen and how it may affect your monitor, but we know this is a concern for buyers of our OLED Spectrum monitor, and while it’s always best to use these methods to improve the longevity of your monitor, we want our customers to make the most of their device without their user experience being diminished by this issue, so we offer a two-year warranty specifically for burn-in. Paired with the prevention features built-in to the monitor, you can be sure you’ll get several years out of it.