do you ever wonder what the pixel cleaning or pixel refresh option is on
your fancy new OLED TV or monitor sadly it doesn't Windex your screen for you
despite the name but it could be the most important feature your display has
as it's crucial for mitigating a serious problem that's intrinsic to oleds even
if you're not an expert on displays there's a good chance you've heard of
Burnin where ghostly visual artifacts stay on your screen if you've displayed
a static image for too long but here's the thing burning is actually kind of a
misnomer it's not like something is literally burning after images into your
screen a better name for this phenomenon is image retention and there are two
types of image retention that pixel cleaning is supposed to help prevent the
first is a more temporary issue after leaving your display on for hours or
even minutes the little transistors that drive the pixels end up reacting
differently to the same input voltage as a result some pixels don't light up as
evenly as they should resulting in image retention the good news is that this
typically isn't too hard for modern OLED displays to correct after a few hours of
use many displays will run a shorter pixel cleaning or compensation cycle
that lasts a matter of minutes once you turn them off what it's actually doing
is adjusting how much current goes through the transistors so that they'll
emit the proper amount of light the next time the TV is turned on we should also
point out that this temporary retention can also be a side effect of your
display heating up from normal use and if this is the case with your TV you can
usually resolve it just by turning it off for a little bit and letting it cool
down unless it's in the house with some evidence you need to get rid of however
there's a more potentially catastrophic kind of image retention that your OLED
has to deal with in a different way and we'll tell you about it right after we
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retention is a result of the chemicals in the organic LEDs themselves degrading
over time this natural wear and tear is
irreversible and doesn't happen evenly instead which pixels degrade faster
depends on exactly what is being shown on the screen which is why static images
can visibly damage your display if they're left up too long and too often
this means that the pixel cleaning Cycles focused on permanent retention
try to make up for uneven wear rather than truly restoring the pixels to their
original state this kind of compensation cycle takes a longer amount of time
sometimes an hour or more and works by measuring how much each pixel has
degraded so that the TV can drive it harder accordingly the next time you
turn it on the more a pixel has worn down the more current it needs to reach
its proper brightness typically TVs won't do this until they've been used
for quite a while such as a couple thousand hours but confusingly displays
differ as to what they'll call their short and long pixel cleaning features
so be sure to check your products on screen instructions or user manual to
figure out which is which if you have a display that allows you to run a refresh
cycle manually and don't run the longer refresh too often as you don't want to
start driving your pixels harder unless you have to plenty of modern displays
are smart enough to do this automatically at the correct intervals
once the display is turned off so our advice is to only manually run the long
compensation cycle if you can visibly see there's a problem and of course it
helps if you don't watch cable news for more reasons than one but I have to
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