I’m seriously considering an MSI MAG monitor. Do I need to adjust my workflow? I do lots of desktop work on my computer and I really don’t want to hide UI elements. I also do some gaming of course. I’d say it’s 70% desktop work and 30% gaming (though it varies). Do any Lemmings have any experience in this matter? Thank you!
Optimum recently did a video on this. After 3000 hours his OLED got very faint burn-in of static UI elements. So it really depends on your use case.
If you’ll use it to game for a couple of hours a day after work, it’s probably gonna be 5 carefree years enjoying the wonderful OLED contrasts before you even start noticing burn-in.
If you (like me) need your monitors to stay on for the entire workday (and then some) - you probably won’t be comfortable with the idea of starting to get noticeable burn-in after only a year of use.
Anyway, that’s pretty much a dealbreaker for me and I’ll probably be getting a MiniLED monitor instead. (Switch&Click recently had a video about this.)
I also like to buy stuff that will last ages, there are still monitors I bought in 2012 happily serving some of my family members. Buying something that will expire even if cared after seems… wasteful?
Yeah, 3k hours is nothing. I’m an edge case, but I am on my computer most waking hours, and gaming most of the time. I have something like 5.5k hours of game time in Forza Horizon 5, which just turned 4 years old; I have several other games I play heavily too, like 900 hours of American Truck Sim in the last 2 years.
I’m in the ‘wait for prices to keep dropping’ boat, and my current monitor is fine other than ‘just’ being a ips lcd instead of oled or whatever else. But at that time frame, I’d be buying new units like every 2 years. That’s fucking insane. I expect like a decade of issue-free use from a monitor.
I know monitors aren’t RAM or SSDs, but given what is happening with computer parts, I want to steer away from wear-components to the extent reasonable.
I do still use SSDs because of the overwhelming advantage compared to HDDs, but I’m perfectly content with non-OLED monitors.
I feel the same way, we have TFTs at work that are 20+ years old and still working just fine.
Of course that’s super bad for manufacturers if you just buy one monitor every 20 years.
extremely dumb question, but why aren’t there screensavers that will invert the average pixel use when you’re not using it, opposite of safety, definitely not for office work, but home use?
OLED monitors typically have burn-in prevention and repair features built-in. They sometimes have a mode where the brightness can fade in and out depending on their use or one where pixels are triggered on and off repeatedly to help reverse existing burn-in.
If the screensaver is saving the information of what a pixel has been on average, there’s all sorts of potential for leakage of sensitive information onto a part of the computer that shouldn’t have that information.
i mentioned that problem, definitely not for sensitive work. however, it’ll at best would leak what program someone uses regular by static UI elements. give some random noise (or an aesthetic variant) and it’ll be really hard to figure out what someone was doing.
I would argue that desktop software capable of doing this (storing and using past pixel values to calculate some sort of output) violates the principle of least privilege, so that an OS that supports this kind of screensaver being possible shouldn’t be used for sensitive data, even if that particular screensaver is disabled.
Better to harden the OS so that programs (including screensavers) can’t access and store the continuous screen output.
That’s one of the problems we have with Windows Recall. We don’t even want the OS to have the capability, because we don’t want that data being copied and processed somewhere on the machine.
I thought it’ll just keep a tally of the brightness of each subpixel. not like how bright they are at each point (ie, a recording), but just store their sum and how long was it “recording” to get the average of each pixel. still has a safety concern, but it’ll be hard to extract usable data, beyond which programs I’m using. make the running average for a week rather than a session, and the best you’ll guess is which program I use the most.
It uses multiple techniques like that to balance and prevent burn in, called something like oled panel care. Its a very mature system now.