(Image credit: Future)

• A 3-year test of OLED TVs showed burn-in is highly unlikely with mixed viewing
• Edge-lit LCDs appear to fail before other kinds of TV in the test
• No clear correlation between price and longevity, however

When I was a teenager I used to devour scary stories, but nothing I read was as scary as the tale of the OLED with burn-in. You’re probably familiar with it too: it’s a tale of someone who buys one of the best OLED TVs only to see the logo of their favorite channel, or the HUD of their favorite game, burnt into the display forever. But like many cautionary tales, the likelihood of this happening may be smaller these days than the stories suggest.

That’s what the results of an ongoing study by Rtings say, anyway. The folks there have been running over 100 TVs at maximum brightness for three years, racking up 18,000 viewing hours for each one. And while some OLEDs did indeed suffer issues, LCDs suffered far more serious problems.

Which TVs Break First? Results Overview From Our 100 TV Longevity Test - YouTube

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How do OLED and LCD TVs handle nearly 20K viewing hours?

The ongoing testing has demonstrated several things, most notably that lower-end edge-lit LCD TVs appear to fail sooner than LCDs with better kinds of backlighting: the tested models suffered from warped reflector sheets, cracked light guide plates and burnt-out LEDs due to the heat they generate – although it’s important to note that these tests run the TVs at maximum brightness, which isn’t necessarily how you’d do it at home. That makes this a television torture test.

As of November 2025, 20 of the 100 TVs that started their testing in 2022 had failed completely, and a further 24 had experienced partial failures. The site has published full details of those failures and partial failures here.

What about OLEDs? Rtings found that both WOLED and QD-OLED TVs performed "exceedingly well", and while burn-in did develop during the torture test that shows a single logo on the screen for the entire time, that "isn’t really an issue under mixed usage". Every OLED tested did develop burn-in, but previous testing found that unless you constantly watch content with static logos you’re unlikely to encounter any issues with models from 2022 or later.

It’s also worth noting that 18,000 hours of runtime is much more than most people will watch before upgrading their TVs: if you watched TV for three hours every day, it’d take you over 16 years to reach that figure.

So what does this mean for would-be TV buyers? While many of the entry-level TVs did fail over time, Rtings found no direct correlation between price and longevity. But it did find that OLEDs tended to be the most reliable and edge-lit LCD the least, so if you’re in the market for a new TV then OLED, or LCD with local dimming zones may be the better buys.

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Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.

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