OLED "burn in"?

[TheOldPresbyope]

It's common to see warnings about OLED displays dimming with time. For example, here's what Adafruit says in the product descriptions of its OLED displays:

Please note that OLED displays are made of hundreds of...OLEDs! That means each pixel is a little organic LED, and if its kept on for over 1000 hours it'll start to dim. If you want to keep the display uniformly bright, please turn off the display (set the pixels off) when it isn't needed to keep them from dimming.

The only OLED displays I own are larger format and have been used to display changing color images for at most a few hours at a time in other projects. Dimming has not been an issue with them.

Now I'm considering implementing a pair of small displays ala @DRONE7 's nifty build and I'm wondering about the possibility of "burn in" because of the nature of the display images.

It's easy to accumulated 1000 hours. It's been roughly 17 000 hours since @adrii posted his Guide. Surely, if this dimming is a serious issue then some of you have experienced it by now. Anyone find it objectionable?

Regards,
Kent

[adrii]

Hi Kent

I started noticing screen burn before maybe a year of use. The big clock from the mpd_oled "stop" mode is on way more than the "play" mode and you can see the shadow of the large digits in the following image

   

The OLED has been in 24-hour use for maybe 30 months.

[EDIT] i forgot to say, I added a period screen inversion option that my help with this, but it means having the screen periodically inverted!

https://github.com/antiprism/mpd_oled/issues/32

[EDIT 2] The top right of the screen is the wifi signal strength, and is present in all modes, and so this is what the pixels look like after being on for 20000 hours.

Adrian.

[vinnn]

Yes OLEDs are notorious for this, even the high density panels used for TVs. The more basic OLEDs for small fascia displays suffer quite badly if left on all the time.
The best workaround for this is to have the display blank after a short idle time.
My Topping DAC has this option, the display only comes on when the resolution changes or a button is pressed.