One of the biggest fears when buying a device that mounts a screen with OLED technology is the dangers of suffering from the effects of burn-in on the panel. This problem occurs when an element is continuously repeated in the image, producing a ghost effect that does not disappear at any time. This is obviously something that bothers a lot, so it is still a problem that determines the purchase of many users. So the question is, does this affect the Nintendo Switch OLED?
Does the OLED screen on the Nintendo Switch burn out?
That is the question that Wulff Den raised on his YouTube channel. Intrigued by the possibility that his console suffered from the ugly effect of on-screen marking, he decided to do the necessary tests to reproduce the error, and the results could not have been better. But before commenting on the results, let’s explain how you performed the experiment.
The first thing you needed to establish was the still image of some game that will allow you to obtain conclusive results. For this he decided to opt for The Breath of the Wild , since the Zelda game has quite a few fixed elements in the interface, as well as highly illuminated scenes. To be exact, he moved inside a temple to enjoy highly illuminated and contrasted views, ideal when looking for a quick screen burnout.
But it wasn’t going to be that easy. Our protagonist also has a Twitch channel, and he usually plays his Switch a lot (in fact, he has two), so having the game turned on all the time was going to cause problems. Every time he turned on his second console, the profile would be banned from the network and the image would disappear, causing the experiment to fail.
In the end, he decided to go for the simplest and most viable solution, which was nothing more than taking a screenshot and leaving it open 24 hours a day. Of course, to prevent the console from going into sleep mode, he activated the Turbo control of his Hori controller so that the controller was pressing a certain button all the time, making the console believe that someone was playing.
Satisfactory results
Well, after 1,800 hours of being with the screenshot showing all the time, the screen of the OLED Switch did not present any type of visible mark that could affect the user experience. The only difference that it seems to have found is that the tonality of the screen could have changed slightly, but it is something that is not so easily appreciated and that could be due to many, many factors that would not have anything to do with long exposure.
That said, the conclusions of the experiment are pretty clear. You should not worry about playing a game for hours and hours and fear that the panel will burn out. It does not matter that a certain game has many fixed elements or that you leave the console on without doing anything.
