OLED Burn-In: What It Is and How to Avoid It
October 31, 2026 · TrimSwap
OLED screens have perfect blacks and vivid colors, but they come with one well-known weakness: burn-in. The good news is that with a few simple habits, it's unlikely to be a problem for most people.
What is burn-in?
Each pixel on an OLED screen makes its own light, and the materials slowly wear as they're used. If part of the screen shows the same bright image for a very long time (a channel logo, a taskbar, a game's health bar), those pixels wear faster than the ones around them. Eventually a faint, permanent "ghost" of that image can stay visible on top of everything else. That's burn-in.
Burn-in vs. image retention
- Image retention is temporary. A faint afterimage appears after showing something static, then fades on its own within minutes or hours of normal use.
- Burn-in is permanent wear. It doesn't fade with time.
LCD screens, which use a backlight, don't suffer permanent burn-in in the same way, although they can show temporary image persistence.
What makes it more likely
- The same static image in the same place for many hours a day, day after day
- High brightness
- Bright, saturated static elements, such as logos, tickers and on-screen controls
How to avoid it
- Lower the brightness when you don't need it at maximum.
- Hide static elements: auto-hide the taskbar or dock, and use full-screen mode where you can.
- Let the screen turn off when you're away, or use a moving screensaver such as the bouncing DVD screensaver or the aquarium.
- Use dark mode: on OLED, dark pixels are dimmer and wear more slowly, and black pixels are completely off.
- Keep the built-in protections on. Many OLED TVs and monitors have pixel-shift and pixel-refresh features that run automatically. Check your manual for how and when they run.
- Mix up what you watch. Varied content wears pixels much more evenly than one channel all day.
Do "burn-in fixer" videos work?
Videos and pages that flash bright colors can't undo permanent wear; they just add more of it. If you have temporary image retention, simply using the screen normally (or letting its own refresh cycle run) usually clears it. Rapidly flashing screens can also be dangerous for people with photosensitive epilepsy, so we don't recommend them.