How can I tell burn-in from image retention?

Time. Retention fades once varied content has run for a while, typically minutes to a few hours. Burn-in does not fade at all. Run the test, use the screen normally for a day, then run it again. A ghost still in the same place is burn-in.

Can burn-in be fixed?

Not reversed. The affected pixels have aged and cannot be un-aged. An OLED’s built-in pixel refresh re-balances the remaining pixels so the difference is less visible, which reduces how obvious the mark is without removing it.

How do I prevent OLED burn-in?

Reduce how long any bright static element sits in one place: auto-hide taskbars and navigation bars, use a short screen timeout, turn on pixel-shift, and avoid maximum brightness for constant static content. Ordinary varied use rarely causes burn-in on modern panels within their useful life.

Screen Burn-In Test

Starts on a uniform mid-grey, which is where retained images actually show, then works through white, the primaries, and black. If you find a ghost today, do not conclude anything yet. The first note explains why.

F to start, Space to advance, Esc to exit

Fields: grey, white, red, green, blue, black

How to run it

1
Start on grey and look for shapes you recognise
A bar along one edge, a rectangle, a logo. Retention takes the shape of whatever you leave on screen.
2
Advance through the rest
Sub-pixels wear at different rates, so a ghost invisible on grey can appear on red or blue.
3
Come back tomorrow
The single most useful step, and the one nobody does. Same test, next day, same place on the panel?

Field notes

You cannot diagnose burn-in in one sitting.

Image retention is temporary. A ghost left by a static image, which fades over minutes to hours of varied content, and which every panel type including LCD can show.

Burn-in is permanent, caused by emissive material in OLED and plasma pixels ageing unevenly. It does not fade.

This test looks identical for both. The only thing that separates them is whether the ghost is still there tomorrow, which is why the third step exists.

Last checked 2026-08-04

Grey finds far more than white does.

A retained region differs from its surroundings by a small luminance offset. On white both are near the top of the panel’s range and the difference gets compressed away. On black both are near zero. Mid-grey puts the whole panel in the middle, where the offset is most visible.

You do not have to take my word for it. All three patches below are offset by the same amount:

White field

Mid-grey field

Black field

Offset of the inset patch6 / 255

Not a photograph. All three patches are offset from their background by exactly the same amount. Wind the slider down until two of them disappear: on most panels the grey one is the last still visible, often by a long way. A retained image is precisely this kind of small, even offset, which is why the burn-in test starts on grey and why running only a white field misses so much. If your panel disagrees, that is worth telling me about.

Last checked 2026-08-04

Burn-in takes the shape of whatever you never turn off.

If a ghost you found matches one of these, you have your cause:

Phone status bar and navigation bar
Desktop taskbar or dock
A broadcaster’s logo in a TV corner
A game’s health bar, minimap, or HUD
A stock ticker or dashboard left open all day

An LCD cannot burn in, but it can hold an image for hours.

LCD pixels do not wear with use the way OLED emitters do, so permanent burn-in is not an LCD failure mode. What LCDs have is image persistence, from liquid crystal molecules settling after holding one orientation for a long stretch. It looks the same and clears on its own, usually within a few hours of normal use.

An LCD "burn-in" still there a week later is more likely a pressure mark or a panel defect.

Run the panel’s own refresh cycle before anything else.

OLED TVs, monitors, and phones ship compensation cycles: short ones that run automatically at standby, and longer manual ones buried in the picture settings under names like Pixel Refresher, Panel Refresh, or Screen Maintenance. They measure per-pixel drift and re-balance the drive levels, and they clear mild retention that no web tool can touch.

Use the manufacturer’s cycle first. A page that flashes colours at your panel is a much blunter instrument.

Not everything on the black field is burn-in.

Faint vertical banding or a dim uneven wash on OLED is usually normal low-luminance non-uniformity, unrelated to retention. On LCD it is likely backlight bleed or clouding, which is a backlight problem and belongs to the bleed test, not this one.

Written by Mor. If a panel of yours behaves differently, tell me and I will correct it.

Questions

Other tools

White Screen Test Check a white field for dust, dead pixels, uniformity, and tint.
Dead Pixel Test Cycle white, black, red, green, and blue to find faulty pixels.
Stuck Pixel Fixer Rapidly flash colors over a stuck pixel to try to un-stick it.
Backlight Bleed Test Spot light leaking around the edges of an LCD panel on black.
Monitor Test Full sweep: pixels, bleed, uniformity, and color channels.
Light Box Use the screen as a tracing panel or soft photography light.