I would love to use OLED for productivity and gaming, but I am afraid of a burn in my productivity time.
Unfortunately, my productivity is mainly Slack and several browser windows which means that the static windows would definitely burn in – sooner or later.
I was thinking how to overcome this and I have an idea which could greatly minimize burn in for productivity.
TVs usually try to avoid burn in with so called "pixel shift" (the whole picture moves few pixels up/down/left/right from time to time).
I call my idea "super pixel shift with reduced resolution".
Example:
The full 4k resolution has 3840x2160 pixels.
Run a smaller Windows desktop slightly lower resolution like 3640x1960 pixels (300 pixels less in every axis). The smaller desktop would be displayed at 100% (pixel by pixel, no scaling)
The smaller desktop slowly moves on a TV screen like an “Arkanoid ball”. If this is slow enough it would not be distracting (something like 1 pixel every 10 minutes).
Advantages:
1] A burn in would probably still happen to some degree, but it would be distributed to larger portions of a screen
2] people complain that 55” is too big for desktop – this would make desktop smaller
Disadvantages:
3] Full resolution is not used
4] Desktop moves on the screen (it would not be centered on the screen most of the time)
5] I am not aware of any tool which could do this but I think it should not be overly complicated to develop one.
Do you know someone who can help with point 5? In a perfect world a TV itself could do such thing but I think we will never force LG to implement this. Changing TV's firmware can be probably quite complicated but I believe that there is a way to force windows (drivers) to do this with relatively simple script/tool.
What do you think?
So if you're using an OLED screen for productivity and want to reduce the odds of burn in, (productivity is not my suggested use), you just use custom resolutions periodically to switch between them.
So for example, have a month using 3840x2160, then a month using 3840x1940, then a month using 3840x1800.
Theoretically the static elements should all shift to different parts of the screen which should in turn reduce the likelyhood of burn in dramatically as rather than those static elements occupying the same part of the screen for 3 months straight, they'd only occupy it for 1 month during a 3month period. That means a 66% reduction in times those pixels are on a static element.
You can do this with Custom Resolution switcher which you can download. Its really quick and easy way to switch resolutions.
Another thing you can do is lower the OLED light. try lowering it to 15-20 (I honestly find this absolutely fine for SDR content in a dimly lit room.. still brigher than my plasma and reduces eye strain for such a huge screen).
If you're doing productivity work which doesn't involve colour, you can also just hotkey windows black and white mode for those odd instances although I haven't heard of any data supporting black and white leaves OLEDs completely immunse to burn in.
I believe I touched on this in one of my old very long very disorganised guides/posts about hwo to use a burn in but yes, you're basically making the 55'' screen being a bit too big work to your advantage for negation of burn in via custom resolutioning.
why wouldn't you?
