By Hal Brown
(Techies, enlarge images one, two, and three)
Several years ago I bought the television with by all reviews had the best picture of any TV on the market, a top of the line 65” LG OLED. 'OLED' stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode - a technology that uses LEDs in which the light is produced by organic molecules. These organic LEDs are used to create what are considered to be the world's best display panels. Reference
These were and still are the most expensive televisions on the market. It turned out that OLED televisions also had a serious problem not present with other technologies: burn-in as described in these articles:
OLED screen burn-in: What you need to know now, CNET
OLED Screen Burn-In: How Worried Should You Be? How-to-Geek
They are highly susceptible to images burning in permanently from a station that you watch for many hours a day. The problem has still not been corrected. In my case burn-in was caused by having MSNBC on for many hours a day. If you frequently watched ESPN or a financial news station, and I assume if you watch Fox News, you will have had the same thing happen.
At first my burn-in was only visible on solid backgrounds which meant I only noticed it getting worse with pictures like the one illustrated above. It started just at the bottom of the screen by moved up to where the face in the middle of the screen would be, and then to where three faces would be, and to where other text on the top of the screen would be. Of course you generally didn’t see it when tuned to MSNBC.
This year as I tried to escape political news and began to watch more and more streaming video almost every image depending on the colors on the screen had at at the least the MSNBC logos visible on the bottom of the screen. I’d be watching a show with lovely scenery and it would be spoiled by seeing the burned in MSNBC logos. It got progressively more annoying as these dark shadows were visible in any picture with a light background.
I’d decided some time ago that eventually I’d buy a much less expensive QLED television. Apparently cyber-Monday prompted the TechRadar website to post this story just four days ago: OLED vs QLED: the premium TV panel technologies compared. Suffice to say that OLED still has the best picture and is a totally new technology while QLED is a tweak of an older technology which produces a picture almost, but not quite, as good as the one on an OLED.
I had a major dental expense last month so I didn't want to spend more money but I have to admit that all the ads for cyber-Monday broke down my reluctance when I saw the one day discounts.
This is what pushed me to go onto Amazon and instead of researching an electronic product like I usually do, ordering what they labeled their Amazon Pick. It happened to be the second cheapest Samsung QLED. It cost less than one third of the price I paid for my LG set.
My rationale, or perhaps rationalization, for doing this was that I wanted to erase a remnant and reminder of my four year addiction to watching MSNBC incessantly thanks to Donald Trump.
Come December 5th when my new TV will be delivered I will set it up and say a symbolic good riddance to these dark shadows which are reminders of Donald Trump.