How to Check for OLED Burn-In Before Buying Used
Burn-in will tank your resale value and it gives you this visual problem that just gets worse and worse the longer you own the display. If an OLED TV or monitor already has bad burn-in, a panel replacement is going to run you almost as much as a brand new unit would cost. LG, Samsung and Sony all make premium OLED screens that dominate the high-end market, and as owners upgrade, more and more used units flood the secondhand market every year - plenty of them have some hidden damage that’s very hard to catch unless you know exactly what tests you’ll have to run.
The only way to protect your investment is to test a display before you buy. Just a few minutes with the right test patterns will show you any damage that might cost you thousands of dollars to repair later. You don’t need to be an expert to run them either - all you need is to have access to the screen and a general sense of what to look for. Skip these checks and you’re trusting the seller to be honest and to remember every little detail about their equipment!
Let’s go over how to catch burn-in so you can shop with confidence!
How OLED Burn-In Appears on Screens
Burn-in shows up as ghost images that get stuck on your screen for good and they’ll stay there regardless of what you’re watching or what input you switch to - like a faint outline of a news channel logo in the corner or maybe a status bar from your settings menu that doesn’t go away.
These marks become permanent because the OLED pixels in those particular areas have actually degraded way faster than the other pixels around them.
Burn-in happens when the same static elements stay in one place on your display for hours at a time. Each one produces its own light. OLED pixels are self-illuminating. As they run, they lose brightness over time. When a bright logo or menu button sits in the same position for hundreds of hours, those pixels will degrade much faster than the ones around them. The result is a permanent ghost image that shows up against the newer, brighter areas of your screen.
Back in 2018, CNN logos became infamous for what they did to OLED screens in airports and waiting rooms all across the country. The bright red and white graphics would burn themselves directly into the screens that played the news channel all of the time, day after day. The Nintendo Switch OLED has received similar attention from tech reviewers for this exact same problem. Switch games usually feature static interface elements like health bars and mini-maps, and these elements stay locked in the same place on your screen the entire time you play.
You don’t necessarily have permanent damage just because you have an image retention issue on your screen. Temporary retention and permanent damage are two different issues and it’s worth trying to figure out which one you have. Temporary retention will fade away after a few minutes or maybe a few hours if you watch something else with more mixed content. Permanent damage is what it sounds like - it never goes away. One simple way to test which one you have is to pull up some color screens or just switch over to a different program for a little while and then check if the ghosting disappears on its own.
Free Tools to Test Your Display
Once you finish the physical inspection, the next part is to test the screen and see how it performs. You won’t need to spend money on any software - plenty of free tools out there can help you check a used OLED display for any problems.
YouTube has a few channels that specialize in plain color test videos that are at full resolution. You can load up a pure white screen or a plain gray background in just a few seconds and the videos will work on any device that can play YouTube content. OLED.info is another solid option with built-in test patterns that you can access through any web browser on any device. Android TV users can also download apps like OLED Tools that let you display full-screen colors with a single tap.
Each color does something a little bit different when you’re running these tests. A white screen is going to tell you about the general health of the panel and it’ll also show you how much wear the pixels have picked up over the course of their lifespan. Gray backgrounds work much better for catching faint ghosting or image retention problems that vanish when you’re looking at brighter screens. Red, green and blue screens let you test each type of pixel on its own and this matters because OLED panels use different sub-pixels for every color.
These tests are easy to run - you don’t need any technical knowledge at all. Just pull up the resource and expand it to fill your screen and then take a step back and scan the display for anything that looks wrong or doesn’t match up with the rest. It only takes a few minutes from start to finish and it’ll give you a better sense of what you’re about to buy.
Once you have these tools ready to go, you can give the panel a full inspection. After that first check, the next step is to look at the areas where burn-in will show up.
How to Test Your Display Screen
First find a dark room where you can do this properly. Dim lighting matters for this test because any faint discoloration on your screen is much easier to see when there isn’t too much ambient light working against you. After you have the room set up the way that you need it, load up your first color and leave it displayed on the screen for at least 2 or 3 minutes.
This waiting period matters more than the first one. Screens need at least a few minutes to get to their normal temperature and burn-in won’t always show up right when you first power the panel on. Lots of times, it takes a few minutes of operation before any image retention starts to become visible on the screen. What looks fine in those first 30 seconds can start to show problems once the display has been running for a bit.
The best strategy is to go through each color one at a time. Pull up a red screen first and take a close look at every part of your display. Then move on to green, then to blue, then to white and finally to gray. Gray backgrounds are the best for revealing uneven wear or any small problems with the screen so it’s worth spending a bit more time on that one.
Sometimes you’ll be able to see faint outlines of images or text that used to be there. Other times there could be patches on the screen where one area looks just a little bit different from another. Grab your phone and snap a few photos as you’re testing each color so you can go back later and review what you saw to compare the results.
As you’re testing the screen, it’s worth checking it from a few different angles too. Move around to the left side and then to the right side of the display. If it’s a smaller screen, try to tilt your head up and down a bit as you look at it. Image retention doesn’t always show itself when you’re looking straight at the screen - sometimes it only shows up if you view it from an angle. You want to catch these problems before the purchase.
How Much Burn-In Is Worth the Discount
Once you’ve finished with the tests, the next step is to make sense of what the results are actually telling you. What you might find is pretty wide - on one end, there could be marks that are so faint you can barely see them and on the other end, you could be looking at damage that interferes with your ability to watch your content.
Light burn-in around the edges or corners might show up as you run your test slides. But it fades away when you switch it back to normal content. With a bedroom TV that’s mainly used for watching movies and shows at night, a little bit of wear like this probably won’t bother you all that much. But if we’re talking about a dedicated home theater room, the picture quality is a much bigger priority and those same marks will be a lot more annoying to you.
Plenty of buyers don’t mind a little bit of burn-in on their TV if the price cut is big enough to make it worthwhile. A TV with minor image retention that’s selling for half of what it cost brand new can be a great deal for some buyers. What matters most is if those marks are going to drive you crazy 6 months after you bring it home.
Burn-in is a progressive issue and that means it’s not going to stay the same on your screen. It’ll actually get worse and worse as your TV gets older. A faint shadow that you can barely see right now might become a lot more obvious and distracting after another year of normal use. How much warranty coverage you have left on your TV is going to be a big deal when you’re making this decision.
What the previous owner did with the TV can make a large difference. If the screen already has some burn-in from news channels or video games, it’s going to degrade faster than a screen that doesn’t have any visible damage yet. The pixels that are already burned in have lost some of their brightness and they’ll continue to fade faster than everything else around them.
What Should You Ask the Seller
Once you’ve made contact with the seller, one of the main questions to ask is how they actually used the display on a day-to-day basis. Ask them how long each day it was turned on and what they mostly watched on it. It’ll give you a solid sense of how much wear the panel has accumulated over its life.
News channels and gaming are two of the biggest culprits for the burn-in problem. Static elements stay on the screen for hours and hours with these types of content. PC monitor use is another big concern for the same reason. What makes these usage patterns especially troublesome is that the damage can be happening quietly in the background and you might not see it until much later.
Something else to check is if the previous owner let the pixel refresh cycles run the way they’re meant to. OLED panels need these maintenance cycles to keep them in decent shape and most of the newer models will kick these cycles off automatically whenever the display is sitting in standby mode. But some owners turn this feature off or they’ll unplug their display right after they shut it down. If that happens, those maintenance cycles won’t ever get to finish the way that they need to.
If the seller happens to have the original box or any paperwork, try to find out when the panel was manufactured. Panels from a few years back don’t have the same burn-in protection tech that you’ll find built into newer models. Any screen that’s been around for a while will carry a higher chance of image retention problems than one that’s more recent.
Ask for the original receipt or any proof that they bought it if they still have it. Having that paperwork on hand helps pin down how old the display actually is and it shows that the seller owns it. It’s also worth taking a look at the warranty info as you’re at it because there might still be some coverage left on it that you can use.
The way a seller answers these questions will give you a better picture of what you’re working with. Sellers who dodge questions about how much they used it or who can’t seem to remember even the basic info about what they had on the screen are probably hiding something from you. A legitimate seller won’t have any problem explaining how they used their TV and what type of content they watched on it. Typically.
Trade Your Old Phone for Cash Today
Burn-in never gets better on its own (it just gets worse and even more visible as time goes on) and once you’ve paid for the display, you’re stuck with it. At this point, you have the tools and knowledge to review any used OLED display with confidence. You can pull up the right test patterns and you’ll know where problems usually show up first and you can even use what you find to negotiate a lower price that matches the actual condition of the screen.
Plenty of used OLED screens on the market today don’t have any burn-in problems at all if the last owner mixed up what they watched and didn’t crank the brightness level too high. A little bit of patience goes a long way here, along with the willingness to test everything before you make a buy. Careful inspection means you can land a great display at a fraction of what a brand new model costs with the reassurance that you know exactly what’s on your desk.
At ecoATM, we make the whole process pretty painless when you have an old phone around somewhere and you’d like to turn it into cash. We have over 6,000 kiosks across the country and the process is about as simple as it gets. You bring your phone to a kiosk and it runs through a quick evaluation right there in front of you and then you walk out with same-day payment (either cash or an electronic payment). It’s one of the more convenient ways to get rid of a device you no longer use and to make a little money as we keep it out of a landfill. You can search for your nearest location and see what your phone could be worth today.
