128x32 oled display burn in?

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derekpdx
 
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128x32 oled display burn in?

Post by derekpdx »

Do I have to worry about an image getting "burned in" to the screen on the SSD1306 128x32 OLED display? I am making something that will display the time until someone presses a button, so the time will be displayed for hours at a time.

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: 128x32 oled display burn in?

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

DerekPDX wrote:Do I have to worry about an image getting "burned in" to the screen on the SSD1306 128x32 OLED display?
You might. Pretty much anything that emits or filters light will degrade over time, and I seem to recall that OLEDs have a shorter time-to-50%-output decay curve than regular LEDs. That's fairly common for a new technology though.. the first few years are devoted to making it work at all, then incremental improvements make the technology progressively more bulletproof.

An OLED screen wouldn't have the classic "see it even when the device is turned off" burn-in of an old phosphor CRT, but the pixels that get used most would produce less light than the ones that get used the least.
DerekPDX wrote:I am making something that will display the time until someone presses a button, so the time will be displayed for hours at a time.
I don't have specific numbers for the degradation times on the OLEDs we sell, but I *think* the half-life for OLEDs in general is somewhere around 10,000-15,000 hours. A year is roughly 8000 hours, so that's 1-2 years running 24x7, 2-4 years running 12 hours a day, or 3-6 years running 8 hours a day.

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