I’ve had my phone for some years and in the beginning I’d noticed something called screenburn where some elements of the screen always vaguely showed especially when I had my light settings all the way up and no blue filter mode on. With the blue filter and lower settings it doesn’t happen. But how do these screenburns even happen in the first place?
In: Technology
Every pixel in Organic Light Emitting Device (OLED) screens in phones and TVs produces its own light. This is in contrast to LED screens where each pixel has filters to cut out light from a uniform backlight.
Each pixel in an OLED has to produce its one light and their max brightness decreases if they are on for too long. Therefore, if you have parts of your screen always on, for example clocks, TV channel logos, or even interfaces from video games, those illuminated pixels will lose brightness if they are on for long periods of time. You want to cycle the pixels to show different things prevent this effect.
Now, if you display a full bright image on the entire screen, those worn out pixels will be dimmer and stand out. This causes the screenburn that you notice. The brightness difference is not as noticeable when displaying dimmer things.
It’s different for different types of screens. For example OLED screens have separate little dots for each pixel that output red, blue, and green light. If you overuse one of the colors in one location it will wear out faster than the others.
The more common LCD screens shine a light constantly behind the whole screen, but use little “shutters” to block – or let through – different colors of light. In this case the light isn’t wearing out unevenly, but the part of the display that blocks or allows certain kinds of light will wear out in one area when it’s overused. Also the default for LCD screens it to let light through not block it, so if your blue color “wears out” it may allow too much blue, while OLEDs when worn out would produce too little blue.
Whether you observe this with certain screen settings depends whether the color that’s worn out is one that’s actually being used at that time.
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