Burn-in
A ghost of static content visible on flat grey. Look for a faint taskbar, logo or keyboard outline.
Try: Grey 10%
Burn-in test
See what your panel is really doing.
Fullscreen grey steps, gradients, colour bars and checkerboards — the exact patterns that reveal burn-in, image retention, mura, backlight bleed and banding.
Grey 10%
Burn-in ghosting
Tap the panel for fullscreen · ← → to change pattern
Patterns
How to use it
Three steps, no learning curve.
- 01
Dim the room
Uniformity and burn-in artefacts are almost invisible in a bright room. Turn off the lights and let your eyes adjust for a minute.
- 02
Step through the greys
Flat 5%, 10% and 20% grey fields are where backlight bleed, mura and OLED burn-in show most clearly. Look for patches that are brighter or a different tint.
- 03
Finish with gradients and bars
A smooth gradient exposes banding and dithering, while colour bars reveal tint shifts and channel problems across the panel.
What you are looking at
Four different faults, four different tells.
Image retention
The same ghost, but it fades after a few minutes of other content. Harmless — and this test tells them apart.
Try: Grey 20%
Backlight bleed
Brighter clouds or streaks near the edges on a black field. Common on edge-lit LCD panels.
Try: Black
Banding
Visible steps instead of a smooth ramp. A smooth gradient makes panel quality obvious instantly.
Try: Gradient
FAQ
Common questions
What is OLED burn-in?
Organic pixels dim as they age, and they age faster the brighter they run. When the same static content (a taskbar, a channel logo, a keyboard) is shown for hundreds of hours, those pixels age unevenly and leave a faint ghost image that never fully disappears.
What is mura and backlight bleed?
Mura is a patchy unevenness in brightness or tint across an LCD panel. Backlight bleed shows as brighter clouds or streaks near the edges on a dark screen. Both are manufacturing variance and both are easiest to see on flat grey or black.
Can burn-in be fixed?
It can sometimes be reduced. Many OLED TVs and phones have a pixel refresh or panel refresh routine that runs when the device is idle for a long period. Manually running mixed content for a while helps a little, but genuinely degraded organic pixels cannot be restored.
Is this test safe for my panel?
Yes at normal brightness, and no test here runs long enough to cause damage. Avoid leaving a static full-white or bright colour field on an OLED for extended periods — that is the one thing that genuinely accelerates wear.
How do I tell burn-in from image retention?
Image retention fades within minutes of showing other content; burn-in does not. Run a white field for a couple of minutes, then go back to a flat grey. If the ghost is still there, it is burn-in.
Does a black screen help prevent OLED or plasma burn-in?
It helps, though it cannot undo existing damage. Burn-in comes from static bright content lighting the same sub-pixels for hours, so black pixels are the safest pixels: on OLED they are switched off and age very little. Showing a black screen instead of a bright static image, adding gentle pixel shifting and switching the display off when idle all slow wear down. Plasma panels can also burn in from static content. If you already see ghosting, run this test to judge how severe it is before deciding on a repair.