It's time for another update on OLED monitor burn-in. As you likely know, we've been aggressively burning in our 4K OLED monitor for 15 months now, so we're going to take a look and see how the display is holding up. Hopefully, there hasn't been too much degradation since the last time we checked in three months ago – we really do want this monitor to last a decent amount of time.
As with the last few updates, there have been no changes in how we've been using our MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED. We're still very much demonstrating a worst-case scenario for OLED usage. We almost entirely use this display for static content, such as writing scripts, browsing the web, editing videos, and so on. As a result, there's basically no content consumption or gaming occurring on this display – the complete opposite of how we normally recommend people use OLED panels.
If you missed some of the quarterly updates, we recommend going back to check out at least the initial article, so you can get the full idea of the setup we're using and why we decided to use this MSI 4K 240Hz QD-OLED gaming monitor as our workstation display.
The idea here is to perform a real-world test of OLED longevity in the worst possible configuration – effectively burning in the display on purpose. We swapped our 32-inch 4K IPS LCD for this QD-OLED and changed nothing else about the setup. No dark mode, no screensavers – and that's to see whether OLED monitors really can be used as LCD-equivalent productivity displays over the long term.
I use my monitor more than 8 hours a day, and sometimes that usage is continuous with no breaks for the display to turn off and rest. This leads to hours upon hours of static usage, something that has been perfectly fine for LCDs for a long time, but is quite risky on newer OLED screens.
The progression to this point has been as follows:
After one month and 200 to 250 hours of usage, we saw no signs of burn-in.
After three months, 650 to 750 hours of usage and 71 panel compensation cycles, we saw faint signs of burn-in.
After six months, 1,200 to 1,500 hours of usage and 141 compensation cycles, burn-in was a bit more noticeable than at three months, but not overly problematic.
At nine months – 2,000 to 2,300 hours of usage and 224 compensation cycles – there was still some burn-in, but relatively few changes compared to the six-month results.
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