Uniform fields on a timer. Ghost images hold still while the color changes behind them — step slowly to hunt for them, or crank the cycle speed to exercise stuck retention.
Run it
auto-cycles · ←→ manual · Space pauses · Esc exits
Nine colors, three seconds each by default. The dwell slider goes from a quarter second (exercise) to ten (inspection).
How to check for burn-in
Pause on gray — it's the most revealing field. Look for darker ghosts of things that live on your screen: taskbar, dock, channel logo, scoreboard, keyboard. Shapes you can name are the finding.
Pause on white and repeat. Burn-in that's faint on gray gets a second chance to show against full brightness; so does uneven tint.
Step through red, green and blue. OLED subpixels age at different rates, so a ghost visible in one primary but not the others is still wear — just one channel's worth.
Found a ghost? Note what it is and recheck tomorrow: gone means retention, still there means burn-in. For a deeper look on OLED panels, the OLED test adds near-black and dim-gray slides where wear shows earliest.
Retention exercise — what it does and honestly doesn't
Dragging the dwell slider short turns the inspection into the classic recovery routine: rapid full-screen color cycling that asks every subpixel to swing through its range. On LCDs this genuinely helps clear stuck retention, usually within half an hour. On OLED it cannot restore burned-in pixels — that's physical wear — and we'd rather say so than sell you thirty minutes of hope. What helps a mildly worn OLED is the panel's own compensation cycle (check the TV's picture or panel-care menu), which measures the wear and re-maps brightness around it.
Testing a screen you're about to buy? Run this together with the dead pixel test — five minutes covers the two faults that are expensive to discover later. TV-specific notes, including how to get a browser onto the panel at all, are on the TV screen test page.
What’s the difference between burn-in and image retention?
Retention is temporary: a ghost of recent content that fades on its own within minutes or hours, common on LCDs after long static images. Burn-in is permanent: on OLED, the pixels that spent months drawing a logo or taskbar have physically aged more than their neighbors and now shine dimmer forever. This test reveals both — what it can’t do is tell you which one you have. Time can: recheck tomorrow, and what faded was retention.
Can burn-in be fixed?
True OLED burn-in — no. It’s wear, not a stuck state; no video, app, or color cycle restores aged emitters, and anything promising to is selling placebo. What genuinely helps: OLED TVs run built-in compensation cycles (often called pixel refresh) that re-map brightness to hide mild unevenness, and LCD retention often does clear with the fast color cycling this test provides. Run the cycle at a short dwell for 15–30 minutes and recheck.
Do LCD screens burn in?
Mostly they retain rather than burn. Liquid crystals can temporarily stick after showing the same image for many hours, which looks like burn-in but fades. Genuine permanent LCD damage exists — long-term retention on old panels, and backlight aging that reads as uneven brightness — but it’s rare next to OLED wear. If your “burn-in” is on an LCD, odds are good it clears.
How do I prevent burn-in?
Vary what the pixels draw. Hide static UI where you can (auto-hide the taskbar and dock, use fullscreen video players), let screensavers and sleep actually engage, avoid maximum brightness for static content, and on OLED TVs leave the panel-maintenance features on. None of this requires babying the screen — modern OLEDs tolerate normal mixed use for years; it’s the pinned 14-hour-a-day static layout that does the damage.
Is burn-in covered by warranty?
Usually not: most manufacturers class burn-in as usage damage, not a defect, and say so in the warranty text — with exceptions worth checking (some premium panels and monitors with OLED-care programs do cover it for a period). Before any claim, document what this test shows on the gray fields with photos, note the panel’s hours if the service menu reports them, and read the exact wording for your model.