Today I learned that OLED displays are subject to burn-ins. Not as in catching fire, but in burning the picture it displays into the monitor. This is nothing new, it was already a thing with cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors and the sole reason that screensavers exist in first place. Burn-in is a phenomenon where a monitor shows the same picture for an extended amount of time, resulting in pixels becoming “burned” and keep displaying the previous image even when the overall image has changed. Monitor manufacturers try to mitigate this by shifting the image a few pixels automatically or dimming the screen.

I came across this while checking for a new monitor for my desk and considering an OLED display. Coming across the right YouTube video and spending some time on Wikipedia freed me from the idea of buying an OLED display for that purpose. And not only because of the screen burn ins, but also because the power consumption of OLED displays for bright images is worse than your comparable LCD.