Screen Burn-in Test

In short Image retention is temporary and burn-in is permanent, and the difference matters enormously for what you should do next. Retention is a ghost of previous content that fades over minutes or hours once the display shows something else. Burn-in is caused by the OLED emitters ageing unevenly where static content sat, and no amount of running a pixel refresher will bring it back. If the ghost is still there after a day of varied content, it is burn-in. Flat mid-grey usually reveals it best, followed by cyan; solid white often hides it entirely, which is why a quick white-screen check is not a burn-in test. LCDs are worth mentioning separately: they can hold a temporary image but almost never suffer permanent burn-in, so if you are looking at an LCD, what you are seeing is nearly always retention and it will clear. On OLED, the practical protections are varying content, avoiding a static HUD or taskbar at high brightness for long periods, and letting the set run its own pixel refresh cycle rather than interrupting it.