OLED screens have better brightness, spectacular contrast and vivid colors that make a substantial difference compared to other technologies. However, nothing in this world is perfect, and OLED panels usually have a small drawback, and that is that they tend to burn out over time. The manufacturers of this type of screen have been working for years to mitigate this problem, and it can be said that they have advanced quite a bit in the matter. When Nintendo released the OLED switchdoubts arose. Can it burn? But of course, it takes hours to test it properly. Now that a few months have passed, we have the first in-depth analysis of this effect on the laptop Nintendo OLEDs.
The Switch OLED burns out, but you shouldn’t worry too much
Do you remember the old plasma televisions? well so OLED screens suffer from a disease similar to the one that had that technology. In OLED televisions, it is possible that a mark of the typical fly of the channels that you usually watch can end up staying on the panel, and when used for video games, it can also happen that the UI of a certain title is tattooed on your screen for life .
At this point, screens with this technology have evolved quite a bit, and they no longer burn so easily. In fact, a few years ago it was not difficult to walk through a shopping center and appreciate that the televisions on display had burned themselves with the typical looped video that they usually show. Currently, this effect is quite mitigated. To the point that, when the Nintendo Switch OLED, the first tests concluded that it did not burn. The most interesting test on the entire Internet was made by youtuber Wulff Denwho tested the console with a static and highly contrasted image of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, one of the essentials of Nintendo Switch. In 1,800 non-stop hours, the console didn’t show a single mark, proving that we weren’t going to have any problems with Nintendo’s new handheld.
The experiment continues. Has the Wulff Den Switch burned out yet?
Did Wulff Den stop his experiment? No way! All for science! They have already passed a total of 6 months since the youtuber he backlit Link, and his console is still on at the same point. 3,600 hours later, the screen is starting to show some slight burn marks on the panel, which is known as ghosting. However, the damage to the screen is quite light, and it can continue to be used normally.
This means once again that there would be no need to worry about the Switch OLED screen. If after more than 3,000 hours of forcing the screen, it still doesn’t get significantly damaged, that shows that no static UI from any video game is going to damage your panel. As a curiosity, the Switch has a way to invert the colors and Wulff Den considers that it could be useful in his case to finish burning the screen on the opposite sides and thus have a screen that is as homogeneous as possible. However the youtuber he prefers to sacrifice his console for us and is willing to leave it with the same image another few hundred hours to see if the problem worsens.
