The OLED Burn

We're still aggressively burning in our test 4K OLED monitor and using exclusively it for productivity work. We're now 9 months into this experiment, so it's time for an update. Again, just like the last update, not much has changed in how we've been using our MSI MPG 321URX QD-OLED. We're still talking about a worst-case scenario for OLED usage with maximum amounts of static content and minimum amounts of content consumption and gaming.

If you missed our last three updates, we'd recommend going back and checking out at least the initial article just so you get an idea of the setup we're using and why we've decided to use MSI's 4K 240Hz QD-OLED as our workstation display.

The basic idea here is to perform a real-world test of OLED longevity in the worst possible configuration, effectively burning-in the display on purpose.

I swapped my personal 32-inch 4K IPS LCD for this new QD-OLED and changed nothing else about the setup – no dark mode or screensavers, or anything like that – and that's to see whether OLED monitors really can be used as LCD-equivalent productivity displays long term.

I use my monitor more than 8 hours a day, and sometimes that usage is continuous with no breaks for the display to turn off and rest. This leads to hours upon hours of static usage in applications like web browsers, the Microsoft Office suite, and production tasks like Adobe Premiere and Photoshop.

With virtually no content consumption in our daily use of this display and zero gaming, this is not how we recommend using an OLED at all, though it is a use case that has been perfectly fine for LCDs for a long time.