Image Sticking Raises Questions for OLED TVs
June 26, 2017 

Rtings reports that LG’s OLED TVs are susceptible to burn-in, if an image in retained on the same location for 10 minutes or more. While LG indicates that they have not received any reports from consumers, the issue lingers on. However, Rtings said that consumer’s have complained OLED TVs’ burn-in issues are causing debate mainly in American AV professional communities. The burn-in controversy has been steadily aroused since the early 2000s when OLED TVs came out. It seems to be the biggest shortcoming of OLED TVs. US IT review company Rtings recently conducted a test by showing images of its logo on TVs for 10 minutes and then checking when the remaining images disappeared. Scores were given to the TVs according to the degree of their image retention, and they were rated with ten as the perfect score. Rtings conducted the test on 29 TVs of internationally popular brands including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Sony, TCL, LeEco and Sharp. Sony's X700D model recorded the longest image retention, followed by LG's E6, B6 and C6 models. LG's OLED TV C7, a new model launched in April, scored only 5.4 points. In general, OLED TVs showed poor results. They said, "OLED TVs have the ability to remove image retention. But it takes about an hour to execute the function, and consumers have to turn off OLED TVs to initiate the function," Rtings said. "We also tested the function to move screens slightly to mitigate image retention but failed to remove it". OLED TV solve the burn-in issue by employing a circuit algorithm and by increasing the OLED’ material lifetime. The compensation algorithm called "Off-RS" is employed when the TV is turned off and adjusts the driving current to remove image retention. However, under normal viewing conditions, there is no image sticking. Rtings full test of the 29 TVs was summarized in the following table, in which the OLED TVs were compared against QLED and LED TVs. The OLED outperformed the QLED in 5 out of 8 categories, tied in 1 and trailed in 2.  Compared to LED TVs, OLEDs outperformed in 4 categories, tied in 1 and trailed in 3.
 
 
 
Table 1: TV Performance Comparison QLED, OLED and LCD

Source: Rtings
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