Screen burn-in test
Flat full-screen fields at the grey levels where burn-in actually shows, plus a pixel refresher for temporary retention.
Dark grey is where mild burn-in first surfaces: worn pixels fall below the rest and the shape reads darker than the background.
Set brightness to 70-80% and turn off auto-brightness, or the level will shift while you are looking.
The field already fills the panel below, but the most common burn-in lives in the top strip, which the browser chrome covers. That area needs full screen.
Drives every pixel through white, black and the three primaries for the chosen time. It helps with temporary retention. Against real burn-in it does nothing — a worn diode does not regain brightness.
Contains full-screen colour changes. Do not use it if you have photosensitive epilepsy.
Drives every pixel through white, black and the three primaries.
Generated right here, in your browser. What you type never leaves your device.
Burn-in is not hunted the way a dead pixel is. A dead pixel is a dot: it jumps out against any background. Burn-in is a shape — a status bar, a channel logo, navigation buttons — and it only surfaces on a uniform field, almost always mid grey, because it needs everything around it to be equally lit before the difference registers.
So this test is not a run of primary colours but a staircase of greys. Black shows you nothing and white shows you nothing either: the brightness swamps the difference. The window sits between about 20% and 60% grey, and that is where to look slowly.
One warning about what this page can and cannot do: **it measures nothing**. There is no burn-in score here, and anyone showing you one invented it, because measuring this properly needs a colorimeter pressed against the panel. What the page does is put the right background up so that your eye, which is genuinely good at this, can tell a shape from a smudge.
How to use it
- 1
Raise the brightness and turn off auto-brightness
Adaptive brightness shifts the level while you are looking and will mislead you. Fix it around 70-80%. At minimum brightness burn-in hides; at maximum it washes out.
- 2
Go full screen
The browser chrome occupies the top strip, which on a phone is exactly where the status bar lives — the single most burnt-in area there is. Without full screen you miss the most common case.
- 3
Walk the grey staircase slowly
Pause a few seconds on each level. Burn-in appears as a recognisable shape: rectangles, text, icons. If what you see is shapeless patches or clouding, that is not burn-in — that is panel uniformity.
- 4
Check the flat colours
After the greys, run through red, green and blue. OLED burn-in usually carries a tint: the worn area leans magenta or yellow, because the blue subpixel degrades faster than the other two.
- 5
If you see a shape, decide whether it is permanent
Turn the screen off for ten minutes and look again. If the shape has gone or faded a lot, it was image retention and nothing is damaged. If it is identical, it is burn-in.
- 6
Run the refresher only if it was retention
The refresh cycle drives every pixel through every colour for a few minutes. It helps with temporary retention. Against real burn-in it does nothing at all, which is worth knowing before you leave it running for ten minutes.
Where it came from
Burn-in is older than flat panels. On a cathode-ray monitor the picture was painted by an electron beam against a phosphor coating, and phosphor struck in the same place forever lost brightness. Terminals through the seventies and eighties held the same menu on screen for whole shifts, and the menu ended up etched into the glass permanently.
That is where a word everyone uses without thinking comes from: screensaver. It was not a metaphor or a decoration. The program existed literally to save the screen, moving pixels so that no phosphor always took the same dose. The fish, the flying toasters and the bouncing logo were the charming side effect of a very real hardware problem.
Plasma brought the problem back in the 2000s, and spectacularly: the channel logo in the top right corner was the classic case, alongside the black bars of widescreen films. Manufacturers shipped televisions with instructions not to watch the same channel for long stretches in the first weeks.
LCD granted a truce of more than a decade, because its backlight does not wear out in patches. OLED ended it. The problem came back and so did the countermeasures: shifting the image a few pixels every few minutes, dimming static elements automatically, and refresh cycles the television runs by itself once you switch it off.
- 1983
- first known PC screensaver
- Blue
- the OLED subpixel that degrades first
- ~4 h
- of cumulative use before an LG OLED runs its refresher
Why a screen keeps the picture
An OLED panel has no backlight: each subpixel is an organic diode emitting its own light, and emitting light wears it out. A diode that has spent ten thousand hours showing a white status bar emits less light than its neighbour, which spent half that time switched off. Put a uniform grey up afterwards and both receive the same signal but do not produce the same brightness, and that difference draws the shape of whatever used to be there. That is burn-in: not a mark, but uneven wear.
The three colours do not wear at the same rate. The blue emitter is the shortest-lived, because of the chemistry of the material — making one that lasts as long as red and green is still the open problem of the technology. So a heavily used area loses blue first, and burn-in shows up tinted, leaning yellow or magenta depending on what has been worn away.
Image retention is a different thing and is constantly confused with burn-in. Nothing is worn there: charge is trapped, in an LCD inside the liquid crystal itself and in an OLED inside the transport layers. The shape looks the same, but it dissolves on its own within minutes or hours. The practical test that separates them is time: switch the screen off, wait, look again.
An LCD cannot suffer burn-in in the strict sense, because its light comes from a shared backlight that does not wear out in patches. It can suffer retention, and quite visibly. If your panel is LCD and you see a shape, it will almost certainly go away.
Telling them apart without this page
The test needs no software. It needs a uniform field and patience, and you can put that together with what you already have.
- 1
Any photo viewer showing a single-colour image works, or a blank document with the background changed. Mid grey works better than white.
- 2
At a hand span you see panel texture and get distracted. At a metre you see the shape. Burn-in is recognised by its shape, not by its detail.
- 3
If the patch changes intensity as the angle moves, it is uniformity or the coating, not burn-in. Burn-in does not depend on viewing angle.
- 4
With your phone, same distance and same brightness, today and in a month. It is the only home method for knowing whether it is progressing, which is the question that actually matters.
If something is not working
Symptom:I can see the status bar outlined on the grey
- Likely cause:
- The most common case on OLED phones: the top bar has been lit since you got the phone, with the same icons in the same places.
- What to do:
- Switch the screen off for ten minutes and look again. If it is unchanged, it is permanent burn-in. To stop it progressing, turn on dark mode, hide the status bar in full screen, and lower overall brightness.
Symptom:The shape fades away on its own after a while
- Likely cause:
- That was image retention, not burn-in. Trapped charge, not wear.
- What to do:
- Nothing needs doing. If it bothers you and comes back often, run this page’s pixel refresher, or simply leave the screen off for a longer stretch.
Symptom:I see patches or clouding, but no recognisable shape
- Likely cause:
- That is not burn-in. It is panel non-uniformity, very common on IPS and VA, or an uneven backlight.
- What to do:
- Software cannot fix it and it does not get worse over time. If it is severe and the device is new, it is within what can reasonably be claimed as a defect.
Symptom:The mark only shows on one colour, not on grey
- Likely cause:
- A subpixel of that colour is degraded in that area, usually the blue one.
- What to do:
- That is early-stage burn-in. It does not reverse, but changing the habits that caused it — static wallpapers, high brightness, the same app for hours — slows the spread.
Symptom:The pixel refresher changed nothing
- Likely cause:
- Expected, if it was real burn-in. No colour cycle returns brightness to a worn diode.
- What to do:
- Take it as confirmation that the damage is permanent and stop trying: running more cycles at high brightness adds hours of use, which is exactly what causes the problem.
Symptom:My screen is LCD and I think it has burn-in
- Likely cause:
- An LCD does not burn in strictly speaking: its light comes from a shared backlight that does not wear out in patches.
- What to do:
- It is almost certainly retention and will clear. Leave it off for a few hours. If a day passes and it is still there, check whether what you are seeing is actually a pressure mark on the panel.
Things worth knowing
The word screensaver is literal
It was not named poetically. The program saved the screen from phosphor burning where the picture never moved. When LCDs made the problem disappear, the screensaver stayed on out of habit — and for the password prompt.
Burn-in has a colour, and always the same one
OLED burn-in leans yellow or magenta because what is missing is blue: the blue emitter degrades before red and green. A warm-tinted shape on grey confirms you are looking at wear rather than retention.
Cash machines and airports are a museum of burn-in
Any screen showing the same interface twenty hours a day for years eventually shows it while switched off. Departure boards, ATMs and fast-food menu screens are where the phenomenon is visible in its purest form.
Almost no warranty covers it
Most manufacturers classify burn-in as use-induced damage rather than a manufacturing defect, and exclude it explicitly. That is the practical reason to catch it early: inside the return window it is still their problem and not yours.
Your television is already fighting it without telling you
OLED sets shift the image a few pixels every few minutes, dim static regions, and run compensation cycles at power-off. If your TV takes a moment to fully switch off, that is often what it is doing.
Frequently asked questions
Why grey rather than black or white?
Because burn-in is a brightness difference and needs room to show. On black the OLED pixels are off and there is nothing to compare; on white they all run at maximum and the difference saturates. Mid grey leaves both sides room to separate.
Can burn-in be fixed?
No. It is physical wear of the emitter: it has lost the ability to emit light and no software gives that back. What can be fixed is image retention, which is a different thing and clears by itself. Any app promising to repair real burn-in is selling smoke.
Can the pixel refresher make the screen worse?
One run will not, but the honest answer is that running it at full brightness adds hours of use to every pixel, and hours of use are the cause of the wear. Use it when you suspect retention, not as routine maintenance.
How long does an OLED take to burn in?
It depends on brightness, content and model, and any specific figure would be invented. What is measured is the pattern: static elements, high brightness and long unbroken sessions accelerate it; changing content and moderate brightness push it out by years.
Does it work on a phone, a laptop and a television?
Yes, on all three. The browser only needs to be able to fill the screen with a colour. On a television the easiest route is opening this page in the set’s own browser, or casting it from your phone.
Does this page store any image of my screen?
No. The page paints colours; it cannot read what is displayed or take screenshots. There is no camera, no upload, and no server receiving anything.
Can OLED burn-in be reversed?
No. Burn-in is uneven wear: the organic compound in the affected subpixels emits less light than its neighbours, and nothing puts that back. What the pixel refresher does is measure the wear and dim everything else slightly to match, which evens out the appearance at the cost of overall brightness. That is compensation, not repair. Image retention is the one that does go away on its own, which is why telling the two apart decides whether waiting will help you.
Is OLED burn-in covered by warranty?
Usually not. Most manufacturers classify it as wear from use rather than a manufacturing defect and exclude it by name, sometimes with a specific clause about static content. Some extended plans sold separately do cover it. That exclusion is the practical reason to test early: inside the return window the decision is a return, which no warranty clause governs.
Which televisions suffer from screen burn?
OLED, because every pixel makes its own light and wears with use. LCD and LED sets do not burn in — including QLED, which is an LCD with a quantum-dot layer in front of an ordinary backlight — because that backlight is a single sheet that ages evenly. They can show temporary image retention, which fades. Plasma burned in badly and is no longer made. So if your set is OLED the risk is real but manageable, and if it is any kind of LCD a permanent mark is almost certainly something else.
Related tools
Screen test
Eleven full-screen patterns plus what your browser genuinely knows about the panel, with nothing to install.
Monitor calibration
Eight steps, each with its pattern, the exact state to reach, and which control to move in your monitor’s own menu.
Dead pixel test
Nine full-screen colours and an exerciser. Tells a dead pixel from a stuck one — different faults, different outcomes.
Refresh rate test
Measures the Hz you are receiving right now, not the ones on the box. With a motion test and a full display readout.
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