- Hi, I'm Linus Sebastian
and you may remember me professing
my love for LG's OLED displays in YouTube videos
like "every other monitor is dead to me"
and "My end-game gaming TV."
Well, now that I've been daily driving one
for the past few months,
I'm going to show you everything wrong with it
and hopefully how to fix it.
- What about today's sponsors, Mr. Sebastian
- Ha ha, thanks Jamie.
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When I reviewed the 48 inch LG C10 earlier this year,
I loved it, so much that as soon as David got his own
and returned mine,
I dumped my old monitor set up and put it in my office
and all of the great stuff I said about it still holds up,
its high refresh rate and unbeatable pixel response times
make it among the best gaming displays on the market,
And its inky blacks and great color performance,
make it super comfortable to use for everything else.
Be it movies, spreadsheets, the whites.
That is why I'm still gonna have
an affiliate link to it below.
But before you click on that,
this burn-in
is a result of snapping my windows
into the four corners of my display,
a pretty common thing to do on such a large monitor
and Wendell from Level1Techs,
who has been daily driving one of these for longer than me
has also hit some snags.
- It is amazing, but what's not amazing
is that I'm starting to see signs of burn-in.
Hmm.
It's unsettling. It's just enough to be unsettling.
- Yeah, mine too.
But LG thought of that and maybe, just maybe we can fix this
with a feature that's built into every OLED display
that I'm aware of, that LG calls pixel refresher.
Start now,
hopefully that works.
I guess we'll find out soon enough, but while it's running,
let's talk about burn-in a little more
because there's a lot of mixed messages out there,
including from us.
On the one hand you've got manufacturers
like LG saying it's not a problem and on the other hand,
you've got tech experts like Wendell saying.
- I would say that with heavy use,
you know, 6, 8, 10 hours a day, uh,
you can only count on these things lasting about a year,
maybe two.
- What's the truth? As usual, it's somewhere in between.
But to understand why, we need a bit of background
to start with the term,
burn-in is a relic of the CRT days
when your monitor was as big as a microwave
and your TV was the size of an oven.
It's also a total mischaracterization of the problem
because burn-in refers to ghost images
that were quite literally
burned into the luminescent phosphor coating
on the back of the glass of those older style displays.
Here's an example that is so extreme that the DMV stopped
having to even turn the TV on anymore.
But we continue to use this term
because even though the mechanisms are different,
the behavior of modern displays can be very similar.
So whether you're talking
about a CRT, LCD, plasma or an OLED,
if you display static or non-moving images
for extended periods of time,
you might eventually see them as ghosts
that haunt your other content.
So this type of image retention
can affect nearly all direct view modern displays.
The only difference is how likely you are to encounter it,
for LCDs,
which make up the majority of TVs and monitors today,
we could more accurately describe this phenomenon
as image retention,
because it's typically caused by the liquid crystals
losing their ability to easily return to a relaxed state.
We don't talk about it much though,
because it's pretty uncommon.
Unlike lttstore.com.
We talk about that all the time.
Look at this great desk pad.
As for OLEDs, a more apt term would be burned out,
and that's because OLEDs don't have
either a phosphor coating
or any liquid crystals to get stuck.
Each pixel of an OLED display,
actually, each RGB sub pixel is an individual light source,
and from the moment it first powers on it is deteriorating,
and the brighter each one of those little candles burns
the faster it will dim.
Now, obviously this gradual weakening,
isn't going to be too noticeable if every pixel
gets used exactly the same,
but how likely is that to happen in the real world?
So to combat this educated OLED users
can employ a number of tricks to extend their lifespan.
- I've been running this monitor super conservatively.
My OLED brightness has only been around 60.
I left on the, you know, the logo compensation thing
where it tries to detect a logo
or, you know, like the start menu,
and it's like, oh, let me move that around a little bit.
- Those are some good tips, lowering the brightness overall
means that each pixel isn't blasting out
as much light wearing itself out,
logo compensation tries
to surgically dim static elements on the screen
like sports score bugs or news channel logos
and screen shift or pixel shift,
takes the whole onscreen image and tries
to kind of move it around by a few pixels every so often
in hopes of at least softening the transitions
between the more burned out pixels
and the less burned out ones.
But as you saw, when we began this video,
even a few months of use was enough for me to overcome
all of those protections.
My brightness by the way, was usually set to 80,
and I also have pixel shift and logo compensation enabled.
Let's take a look at our results, shall we?
Wow.
Okay, hold on.
Yeah.
Is a lot better.
It works,
but there's bad news,
the way it works is, it runs a horizontal line
down the screen over a long period of time
in an attempt to basically even out
the wear on all the pixels,
so you could think of this approach
sort of like sanding out a scratch from a wood floor.
Yes, the damage is far less noticeable,
but only because you intentionally wore away
the wood around it.
And as you'd expect this kind of thing,
doesn't work forever.
- The pixel refresh function of the display
does help when you turn it off,
it's supposed to automatically do that on its own,
but I think it's kind of diminishing returns at this point.
Text in certain areas,
are not quite as sharp as it used to be,
and I've got this sort of weird red splotch
in the middle of the screen
because, you know, so much stuff is going on
in the middle of the screen.
- Great.
And even if pixel refresher works perfectly for you,
there are some daily use problems with these TVs,
that we should have caught in our review.
One inconvenience is that they don't handle
auto awake from sleep the way that a monitor does,
so you'll have to manually turn it on
every time you sit down at your computer,
but that one's pretty minor compared
to the auto-dimming issues
that Barnacules has been struggling with.
Now, I understand why LG is doing this,
remember the whole burn-in thing?
But when you've got three displays all side by side by side,
something as simple as dragging a window across a border
can cause one or more of the TVs
to suddenly change their brightness
from, I think I can see it to eye searing.
Now I, on the other hand,
I'm only running 1, 48 inch display
and I only have to do my little brightness dance
when I'm reading or editing
a large document for an extended period of time.
So, given that burn-in is a much larger concern for me,
I'm content to leave the auto-dimming alone.
But if you absolutely cannot tolerate it,
there does appear to be a fix.
And, ah,
there it is.
That's right, we've got it.
This is the LG service technician remote
that can supposedly access menus that are hidden
using the regular consumer one.
All Ploof said was "play with it."
Shall we?
Okay. Well, I mean, can you? Okay.
You can do just regular stuff,
like change an input.
What's P check?
Huh.
Oh crap.
Well, now what?
Man, how much do I miss having buttons like this?
Instead of just having an input button
that you have to click a bunch of times,
just HDMI 2.
HDMI 1.
Dedicated button for that.
I kind of just want this remote to just be this remote.
Can I Un-P check it?
Sound check.
Oh, picture check, picture check,
and sound check, that's what it is.
Man, there's so many buttons on here.
What's P only.
Ooh.
Oh geez.
There is a mode with the password.
Here we go, boys.
According to Reddit, it's 0-4-1-3.
What's so special about that date, LG.
And look how smart this is,
see the IR meter
is angled such that it'll just work
if you're just like holding it like this, looking at it.
That's awesome.
Menu.
Oh, hello.
This all looks like the regular menu.
Whoa. Hi, in start. Whoa.
And then we want, OLED.
TPC enable, off.
Wow.
Whoa. Hi.
Oh, look at that.
HDR on, off. Just like that.
I guess normal is auto.
Man, this is the kind of thing you could really
get into the weeds tuning.
And by the way, it would void the heck out of your warranty,
so if you ever did need to get any kind of servicing done
or even update the firmware on your TV,
it is strongly recommended that you return
all of the service menu options to normal and then do it.
Otherwise, I take no responsibility for your stuff breaking.
All right.
And we're back.
Now, is this? Is this brighter than before?
This looks terrible, just a sec.
Houston, we definitely have a problem.
Oh, we're in vivid mode.
I wonder if that's why it looks like crap.
This still doesn't look quite right.
It's horrible.
And then the second I change this to HDR.
I bet it's fixed.
Yep.
And perfect now.
I am going to plug it into my laptop real quick.
Come on. Come on. Come on.
It still looks like absolute dog crap.
It's doing something to the incoming signal,
I have no idea what.
We're gonna put this all back to default.
Exit, okay.
Now, we are going to do a factory reset.
I think I found it. I think I found it.
I think it was just super resolution.
Yeah, I thought that was off.
But I wonder if it's just like a stupid thing
where it was turned on and turned off.
Cause we are in SDR right now
and this looks fine.
Huh. all right, good.
It's back to normal, factory reset
and then changing settings,
even though they,
changing them back doesn't break it again, seems fine.
We need to move on,
because none of what we've talked about so far
supports LG's position, that burn-in is not a problem.
Let's talk about that.
The thing is, the OLEDs on my desks
are not the only ones in my life,
and the 77 inch G10 in my living room,
has actually been there for about
as long as Wendell has been daily driving his C10.
And in spite of being used daily for not just movies,
but also games
which are notorious for burning-in static elements
like speedometers, life bars, you get the point,
it shows no signs of burn-in whatsoever.
And you'll actually find plenty of similar testimonials
from users online.
So, it's clear that OLEDs absolutely
can live long, healthy lives, doing what they do best,
absolutely crushing other technologies
with their image quality.
They just clearly require a level of TLC
that other display technologies do not.
This just means as much as I agree with Wendell.
- I love OLED.
Oh my goodness, this is like living in the future
with this kind of display technology.
Back to you, Steve.
Back to you, Linus.
- I'm gonna have to be more careful
who I invite to be a guest on the channel.
I'm also gonna have to be more careful
about my display recommendations going forward,
because even though,
by the way, the service menu thing
does appear to have worked.
These TVs are clearly best suited
for customers with more typical home theater use cases.
And they're only suitable as monitors
for deep pocketed enthusiasts
who are willing to accept,
either the downsides
like the auto-dimming,
or the cost of replacing them ever so often.
And they'll also have to accept hearing
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Well, that was fun.
By the way, if you enjoyed this video,
maybe check out our video where we fixed a dead CPU.