Flashes the screen through saturated colours to exercise a stuck sub-pixel between its extremes. It sometimes works on stuck pixels. It never works on dead ones. Anyone promising better odds than that is selling something.
About three times per second, for as long as you leave it running. Do not use it if you have photosensitive epilepsy or are sensitive to flashing light, and do not leave it running where someone else might look at it. Esc exits, or use the close button in the corner.
F to start, Esc to exit
Fields: red, green, blue, white, black, yellow, cyan, magenta
Run the dead pixel test first. Stuck glows a colour on black. Dead stays black on white, and nothing here will help.
Short bursts do nothing. Most of the successes people report come after ten minutes or more.
Several separate sessions across a few days beat one very long one.
Each pixel is a red, a green, and a blue sub-pixel. A red dot on black means the red sub-pixel is stuck on and its two neighbours are fine.
That is why this cycles the primaries separately instead of just flashing white and black. White drives all three at once, which gives the stuck one no full off-to-on transition of its own.
Last checked 2026-08-04
Colour cycling works by repeatedly exercising a transistor that has settled into a fixed state, in the hope it lets go. Sometimes it does. Often nothing happens. A pixel that has been stuck for months is much less likely to recover than one that showed up this week.
The trick of pressing a stuck pixel with a cloth or a pen cap works occasionally and destroys panels regularly. Pressure displaces the liquid crystal layer, and what you get is a bright blotch far larger and more visible than the pixel you were trying to fix. On OLED it can damage the emissive layer outright.
It is the most confidently repeated bad advice in this whole subject.
If the panel is in warranty and meets the manufacturer’s dead-pixel threshold, a replacement beats any amount of cycling. Read the policy first, and run this only if you fall short of it or the warranty has expired.
A permanently lit or dark OLED sub-pixel is usually a failed emitter rather than a transistor stuck in a state, and cycling does not bring those back. Run the panel’s own pixel refresh cycle instead, which is built for exactly this.
Written by Mor. If a panel of yours behaves differently, tell me and I will correct it.