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 index 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
Burn-In, where ghostly visual artifacts stay on your screen if you've displayed a static
image for too long. But here's the thing, Burn-In 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's 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 a house with some evidence
you need to get rid of. The second kind of 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.
And I have to thank you for watching this whole video instead. Hey, like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it.
The buttons, not just the emotions, although you can do those too.
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