Oled TV: is marking still a problem in 2024?

If people (and our readers of course) are now quite familiar with the advantages of Oled and QD-Oled televisions — a cousin technology very close to Oled — with deep blacks and infinite contrasts, we also often hear about a major drawback on this type of panel: marking, also called burn-in or burn-in.

Burn-in, marking, what is it?

The OLED pixels being organic and self-emissive (they emit their own light), they can be sensitive to a continuous and static display of the same image and alter over time. This phenomenon occurs particularly in the logos of television channels or news flash banners, subsequently leaving a ghost and darkened image of this logo, even when we look at something else. Obviously, no one wants to see the France 2 or TF1 logo displayed at the top left of their television while watching a streaming series or Uncle Norbert’s vacation photos.

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Should we still be worried in 2024?

Honestly, while Oled marking is inherent to the technology and still likely to occur, it was already quite rare a few years ago and it is very unlikely that it will happen to you today. This phenomenon was mainly a problem on the first generations of Oled TVs, and you really had to have a specific use to see your TV marked like this: watching news channels continuously for several hours a day being the main pitfall, especially if the brightness was high.

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In 2019, our colleagues at Rtings also carried out the test by leaving Oled televisions running for 20 hours a day for a year. A clearly extreme use which had already demonstrated that users who watch content where the pixels are in perpetual motion (video games and sports for example) would not be affected, even less by having a versatile use (regular channel changing, films and series…).

More fear than harm

Many technologies have since been integrated to limit the effects of burning. Manufacturers have notably installed better heat dissipation systems behind the panels, and developed automatic pixel scanning and refreshing tools that are carried out from time to time, when turning off the device. Some models even detect the logos of television channels and automatically dim their brightness after a certain time to avoid any image retention.

In short, if you bought your LG, Samsung, Panasonic, Sony or Philips Oled television in recent years, you will probably have no problem. In the worst case, rather than watching too much news, we can only advise you to relax in front of a good film… or the world curling championships.

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