A new and exhaustive study by Rtings that pushed 102 televisions to their limit for three years has revealed some surprising findings, showing that OLED TVs are generally more reliable over the duration.
While burn-in was a concern with some of the OLED TVs put through their paces, many LCD televisions faced serious problems of their own after remaining switched on at maximum brightness for 18,000 hours.
The test involved all of the TVs showing the same 24-hour live news channel that constantly displays a news ticker at the bottom to assess the impact of burn-in. Of the 102 TVs, 20 of them failed entirely, simply unable to handle the relentless onslaught of news coverage, while another 24 were on their last legs, with the image barely being visible anymore.
That said, the test also revealed that basically all of the TVs were able to survive 10,000 hours without any significant wear and tear, which corresponds to a lifespan of about three years, assuming eight hours of use per day.
With regard to individual brands, LG Electronics and TCL were the best performers, with several of their TVs showing the lowest failure rate in the test, although only a small number of models per brand were used, so we can probably take those results with a pinch of salt.
Although OLED has long been under the spotlight because of burn-in issues, the most problematic TVs were those with LED backlights that lack local dimming. After 18,000 hours of continuous use, almost 60% of such models showed defects that negatively impacted their image quality, and in all of them, several individual LEDs had burned out. For instance, check out the state of the Hisense H8G in the image below. In contrast, OLED failures were extremely rare, the test found.
Another finding is that burn-in was not a problem when viewing dynamic content, but there were issues with static elements such as the aforementioned news ticker, which created “ghosting” effects on several OLED televisions after sustained use at high brightness (see the example of the Vizio OLED 2020 below). That said, OLED burn-in is most likely to be an issue for gaming monitors rather than televisions, as very few people watch the same TV shows constantly, and even if they do, they surely won’t do it for 18,000 hours.
Rtings said OLED TVs have the longest lifespan of all TV types, including Mini-LED models, and develop problems less often. Overall, the results show a clear correlation between the panel, backlight type and failure rate, but surprisingly there was no relationship in terms of prices and lifespan.
You can see the state of some of the TVs for yourself in this video put together by Rtings:
