Screen Burn-in vs. Image Retention

If you can see a faint ghost of a logo or taskbar on your screen, the question that matters is whether it will fade on its own. Two different problems look nearly identical at first glance, and only one of them is permanent.

What burn-in is

Burn-in is permanent uneven wear. On an OLED panel every pixel produces its own light, and the organic compounds that do so dim slightly with use. Display a static element in the same place for hundreds of hours — a channel logo, a game HUD, the Windows taskbar — and those subpixels age faster than their neighbors. The dimmed area stays visible as a shadow because the surrounding pixels are simply brighter. Blue subpixels degrade fastest, which is why burn-in often reads as a warm or yellowish patch.

What image retention is

Image retention is temporary and reversible. Rather than wear, it comes from liquid crystals or pixel charge briefly holding their last state. It appears after a static image has been on screen for minutes or hours, and it fades by itself once the screen shows varied content again. Both LCD and OLED panels can show it, and it is not a defect — it is the panel settling back to normal.

How to tell them apart

Time is the test. Note exactly where the ghost sits, then use the screen normally for a few hours, or leave a moving full-color video playing. Image retention will be noticeably fainter or gone. Burn-in will be exactly as visible as before, in exactly the same place, and it will show up most clearly over flat mid-tone areas rather than over black or white. Run the Burn-in Check before and after to compare against the same pattern both times.

What you can actually do

For image retention, patience is the entire fix. For genuine burn-in there is no repair — the affected subpixels have aged and cannot be restored, and the panel-refresh or pixel-cleaning routine built into many OLED TVs only evens out mild retention, not real wear. What helps is prevention: enable pixel shift and any screen saver your TV offers, hide the taskbar and use dark mode on an OLED monitor, and avoid leaving a paused frame or static HUD on screen for hours. Note that most manufacturers treat burn-in as wear rather than a defect, so standard warranties commonly exclude it — see the manufacturer policy comparison.

Burn-in is a separate problem from a pixel that never lights up at all. If the mark is a single sharp dot rather than a soft shape, run the full test tool and check dead vs. stuck pixels instead.