One of the big concerns people have with OLED monitors is the potential for burn-in, or image retention. There are ways to avoid it, but what if you ignored all that and used them aggressively? That's what Monitor Unboxed did for two years with its QD-OLED burn-in test, and the results suggest modern OLEDs can stand up pretty well to hard use.
On OLED panels, individual pixels wear out at different rates. They grow duller over time with increased use, so sky-high brightness, static elements, hard lines, gaming HUDs, and desktop icons can all affect specific pixels. That makes it more likely that the ghost of an image will remain, even when they're displaying something else, or nothing at all.
Still, after two years of using an MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED monitor for productivity work with lots of static on-screen elements, it held up well. The most obvious thing is a slightly visible line down the center of the screen, where the user has two windows giving the single screen a dual-screen feel. There's also a slight imprint of the taskbar along the bottom of the screen.
White balance is slightly off, but it's only noticeable by the numbers. Green pixels seemed to degrade the fastest, but you can only really see that when they place a filter on the video to enhance the faults. The largest degradation appears to have taken place at around the one-year mark, too, with the past six months only exacerbating existing trends by a little, rather than introducing major image retention.
Pixel refresh technologies may be slightly reducing maximum brightness, but we're talking about a five-nit drop across the entire screen, so it's nothing readily noticeable. Subjectively, the Monitor Unboxed team doesn't see much obvious change day to day. They noted the line down the middle is becoming more noticeable when running a large black background, like a full-screen Photoshop window, but that's not common.
Monitor Unboxed acknowledged several bad habits, like having the screen turn off after several hours of inactivity, versus a few minutes. They also didn't hide the taskbar, and brightness and power weren't adjusted to keep them low when not required. Even with all that and over 6,500 hours of use over the past couple of years, the burn-in is still very hard to spot.
Part of this is down to the monitor's design. It includes OLED care features to help reduce burn-in under typical use. This includes Pixel Shift, which consistently nudges pixels to prevent hard edges from being held by individual pixels. Pixel refresh also helps even out any wear by making brightness and voltage uniform throughout the panel.
Ultimately, these technologies can only stave off the inevitable, but the test shows that OLED burn-in shouldn't be an enormous concern for most users. Plus, monitor makers like MSI and Asus have offered burn-in coverage in their warranties since 2024.