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Do most OLED screen on Samsung smartphones like the Galaxy A20 get the screen burn in problems?

varamilc

Newbie
Do most OLED screen on Samsung smartphones like the Galaxy A20 get the screen burn in problems, and do LCD displays get screen burn in?
 
i have owned pretty much all of the note series since the note 4 save for the note 7 and note 9......never had any burn in problems.
 
I've had my S9 for about a year and a half, and I bought it used so it's older than that. The display is fine with no signs of burn-in so far.
I did have some on my S5 after several years from the dock icons at the bottom, but it was very minor and only noticable on a white background.
Don't let burn-in stories keep you from buying an AMOLED phone. Yes it happens but depending on how you use it and how long you will own it this may be a non-issue. Keeping the brightness down and avoiding high-contrast static images can help prevent it.
Remember there are advantages to AMOLED as well, such as a really nice looking display and better battery life with dark themes that use a true black background.
 
LCD displays don't suffer from burn-in.

OLED displays can, but as long as you don't abuse the phone (leave it running constantly at high brightness with a particular element showing most of the time) it's unlikely you will suffer from it. This is of course why display models in shops can suffer from it, because that is precisely how they are abused.
 
I've never had burn in with a Samsung Super AMOLED display. In fact, pure OLED screens cannot burn in. Organic LEDs create their own light and require no LED backplane. So they can switch on and off (or stay on indefinitely) with no harm done.

But even the QLED displays on their TVs come with a guarantee that if the screen ever burns in, Samsung will replace it.
 
I've never had burn in with a Samsung Super AMOLED display. In fact, pure OLED screens cannot burn in. Organic LEDs create their own light and require no LED backplane. So they can switch on and off (or stay on indefinitely) with no harm done.
But OLEDs' light output decreases with usage. So if you leave them on indefinitely they become dimmer, and that's where the misnamed "burn-in" phenomenon comes from (it's really a "burn-out", and utterly unrelated to the burn-in that plasma displays suffer from): the LEDs producing the brightest parts of a static pattern eventually become dimmer, resulting in a negative impression when displaying a uniform colour. I've seen this on display phones, though never on a phone that has been used normally.

A variant of this that I have noticed is a colour shift: I used my HTC Desire (one of the early AMOLED models) for 3 years, and while there was no burn in by the end of that time it had developed a slight greenish tint. You'd only notice if you looked for it, or compared with the same image on a different display, but it was there. Such colour shifts are to be expected as different colours have different lifetimes (blue OLEDs having shorter lifetimes than red or green). But remember that I used that phone heavily for 3 years and the shift was still slight, and the panel was made in 2010: the technology has improved significantly since then, so I'd be surprised if it was a real issue now. I've got an almost 3 year old Pixel 2 (Samsung AMOLED, but not their best technology of 2017 as they always reserve that for their own phones) and its white is slightly warm but nothing worse - and I think it was slightly warm from the start, so probably very little change indeed. So I'd not panic about this.
 
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Oh Samsung AMOLED screens absolutely can show burn-in.

Here's a nice Galaxy S8 I saw a couple of years ago. Although to be fair this is a showroom device, that has been at full brightness 24/7 for months.
IMG20170927194618.jpg


BTW the R at top-left, means this it's a retail demo phone. Because we've had a few posts where users have actually bought them.
 
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That's a severe case! But as you say, showroom demo model, sits in the shop for months with the screen permanently on at full brightness and mostly showing the same demo screen - it could scarcely be better designed to produce burn-in, but it's nothing like most people's real usage.

The closest to that I can think of that might happen in real life would be someone who drives for many hours every day using the phone for navigation in bright daylight (so high screen brightness). The map itself would move, so would not be a high risk, but parts of the display that always showed the same object would be vulnerable. So if you do that for a living and insist on using the phone that way then maybe I'd be wary of AMOLED - though if that is your life you could just buy a satnav and then you don't have to worry. Otherwise though it isn't a big concern in my experience.
 
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